ISO Rejects Microsoft Office Open XML Format

Sep 04, 2007

Britta Wülfing

The International Standardization Organization, ISO, has announced that Microsoft's Office-Open-XML format (OOXML) has failed in preliminary voting.

A total of 103 member states within the organization were asked to cast their votes by September 2, and the results are now available: 53 percent of all votes cast were in favor of accepting Microsoft's draft as an ISO standard, 26 rejected the application, as the ISO confirms. For the draft submitted as ISO/IEC DIS 29500 to proceed through the standardization process, the approval of two thirds of all countries eligible to vote would have been necessary, with less than 25 percent of opposing votes.

Microsoft submitted its proprietary XML format for standardization in December 2006, accompanied by 6000 pages of documentation. Following the approval of the free Open Document Format ODF as an ISO standard in May 2006, this was the second office application format whose standardization was decided at international level.

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