Geir Isene explains why he thinks the U.S. voted to approve: OOXML promises interoperability with earlier closed binary formats (the Word Doc, older Excel file formats etc.).

Although Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format became an ISO standard two years ago, the company still hasn't built any software that truly complies with the standard.

Keep in mind that Microsoft’s Office 2007 does not implement OOXML … No one does. … Should be hilarious, when they publish it and anyone tries to actually use it. Anyone? Bueller? more ...

Still, even by standards voting, the OOXML vote has been particularly contentious, with both sides slinging mud for the better part of two years over first the Ecma, and then the ISO processes.

Microsoft offered the specification for OOXML, based on Microsoft Office 2007’s .docx default file format, to ECMA International, an industry consortium that also hosts the standards for the C# ...

In the long run, a more rigorous inspection of OOXML is advantageous, because it could potentially bring improvements to the format that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

With OOXML, one can use Notepad or just about any productivity software like Microsoft's rival OpenOffice, to open a file that's saved in Microsoft Word document. OOXML, Microsoft says, is ...

The votes have been tallied but it's still not 100 percent certain that Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document-format is going to become an ISO standard.

MOSCON Slide: OOXML you can see that the positioning now is that the tool is key, and the document format secondary, which, to my mind, is a bizarre assertion, although it’s one that aligns with ...

Just how much impact an ISO-approved OOXML will actually have on the IT marketplace -- or on users of office software -- remains to be seen. On the plus side, an approved standard should make it ...

Arguments about Microsoft’s OOXML format date back to my days when I read Slashdot for fun. Yeah, those days are long gone. Anyway, the International Organization for Standardization rejected ...

Microsoft plans to put out the final beta of the OOXML SDK next month, and release Version 1.0 in May, according to Doug Mahugh, a technical evangelist at Microsoft.