Is Microsoft reneging on its OOXML standards promise?

Will Office 2010 have fully 'standards-based' OOXML support - and does it need it?

Alex Brown, the Convener of the Geneva Ballot Resolution Meeting where OOXML became an ISO standard, has been claiming that the OOXML process has broken down because the beta version of Office 2010 doesn't have support for the 'strict' version of the OOXML ISO/IEC 29500 format agreed as the future of OOXML in the standard. Actually says Microsoft, Office will do - it will read strict documents but doesn't write them (there just wasn't time to do it). A lot of the controversial VML is gone too.

Beyond the technical complexities - of which there are many and I'll try to deal with a few - lies the argument over what's going to be the dominant XML format for documents; not just Microsoft Office documents but word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files in the variety of Web apps and Office competitors. Opponents of Microsoft have contended that the ODF (Open Document Format) is all anyone needs; I've always thought that an inexplicably na