Will OOXML get the ISO standards nod? It's not a given

While there's still a month left before the final votes are tallied, Microsoft's bid to gain ISO standards approval for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format is anything but guaranteed.

Friday February 29 marked the end of a week-long ballot-resolution meeting in Geneva, where participants debated whether or not to approve Microsoft's OOXML as an ISO standard. Representatives now have a month to vote. Based on accounts from some of the attendees of the meeting, it's hard to predict what the final outcome will be.

Microsoft officials were upbeat in their analysis, with Office Program Manager Brian Jones going so far as to say that he was going out to celebrate after the close of the Geneva meeting.

"There were many technical changes the delegates made to really get consensus on some of the more challenging issues, but all of these passed overwhelmingly once they were updated. The process really worked (it was very cool).

"The meeting closed with clapping and cheering, folks were really happy about the improved proposals for the specification and it was a very positive experience for me personally."

(However, as Microsoft watchers will recall, even when Microsoft lost its bid to fast-track OOXML through the ISO process in September 2007, the company issued a press release that painted that loss as a victory. So it's tough to rely on Microsoft pronouncements when trying to ascertain what is really happening on the OOXML front.)

But others -- including a U.S. delegate official head -- were far less upbeat about the ISO standards process or OOXML's standardization prospects.

Computerworld quotes Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation to the ballot-resolution meeting as saying "Eighty percent of the (proposed changes to the OOXML standard) were not discussed." Farance added, according to Computerworld, "It's like if you had a massive software project and 80% of it was not run through QA (quality assurance)."

According to Andy Updegrove, a standards expert and backer of Open Document Format (ODF), the primary rival to OOXML, the U.S. ended up voting against giving OOXML the ISO standards nod, as did a handful of other countries this week.

Sun's Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray, who attended this week's ballot-resolution meeting, said the ISO process is as broken, if not more so, than OOXML itself. (Sun is also an ODF backer.)

"This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen.Their reputation, in my eyes, is in tatters."

When I made my annual predictions for Microsoft for the coming year, I was pretty certain that Microsoft would find a way to get the ISO standards nod for OOXML, given how much of a financial priority that standardization is for the company. But now it's looking like ISO standardization for Microsoft's document format isn't a shoo-in.

What do you think is going to happen, once the votes are tallied?