It will be major egg-on-face time if Microsoft turns out to be wrong. Nevertheless, the company believes that its Office Open XML-based file formats will be accepted as an ISO standard, in spite of an intense IBM-led campaign against it. Microsoft says:
While the final vote has not yet been announced formally, publicly available information appears to indicate the proposed Open XML standard received extremely broad support. According to documents available on the Internet, 86 percent of all voting national body members support ISO/IEC standardization, well above the 75 percent requirement for formal acceptance under ISO and IEC rules.
OOXML has already been approved as an open standard by ECMA, like EcmaScript. When it passes, it will also become one of ISO's standard document formats, which include PDF, ODF and HTML.
OOXML is being used or implemented at some level by more than a hundred suppliers including Microsoft (Office 2007, 2003, XP, 2000), Apple (Apple iWork Pages 08, iPhone) Novell (OpenOffice Novell Edition), Gnome's Gnumeric, Neo-Office 2.1, and Dataviz (Documents to Go - Palm OS). Corel has also announced OOXML support for WordPerfect 2007, and ThinkFree Write, Zoho Writer and Adobe Buzzword are expected to offer compatibility. The Open XML site has a list, though there are also some German ones, for example.
Although IBM has been campaigning against OOXML, it has apparently been busy implementing support in DB2, WebSphere Portal, and Lotus Quickr V8.0, for example. Still, situation normal for IBM, which shipped Windows on its PCs while promoting OS/2, and now supports open source while keeping its own high-priced software closed and proprietary.....
Update: The ISO now has an official announcement, ISO/IEC DIS 29500 receives necessary votes for approval as an International Standard, which includes some background on the operation of the fast-track process.
ECMA, which proposed the standard to the ISO, also has an official announcement, with quotes from the British Library and the US Library of Congress, who were part of the EMCA standardisation of OOXML.
