How serious of a problem is Microsoft Office format as an ISO standard? This page indicates it is a big problem that we need to be concerned with. What do you think?

Didn't it get voted down recently?

Heck, I don't know. I just spotted the page by accident and thought I'd ask about it. “If” it was voted down, then it would seem that it was not a very good idea.

Can anyone confirm that the proposed Microsoft ISO standard was voted down?

I'm not up to speed on all the details, but M$ were hoping to get it signed and sealed in December - and failed:

story at news.com

But it just means that the standard is still up for grabs - open source versus Big Bill (rtd).

It's being billed as a battle between M$ and IBM, but that's a gross oversimplification, as Google, Sun and many others are also involved.

I think the betting is:

Open source 4/6 F
Microsoft 6/4
200/1 bar these.

But the show has some time to run, I think.

Quadrille said:

Open source 4/6 F
Microsoft 6/4
200/1 bar these.

Don't quite understand those ratios. Can you elaborate the shorthand a little

The standard should perhaps be based on OpenOffice documents instead. That would seem more fair and avoid any potential proprietary patent violations by others. Otherwise M$ might be able to find ways to stifle particular companies for using the standard for their own purposes if they happen to violate accidentally some M$ proprietary portion of the standard. We don't want any one company having too much control like that. When you base a standard on proprietary software, you potentially risk patent infringement issues, not a situation to allow.