OOXML is through

As it was already rumored, OOXML got its official approval by ISO today. (Does ISO stand for “I Sell Out” nowadays?)

Benjamin Henrion, initiator of the OOXML campaign, notes:

Committee stuffing is a standard practice for Microsoft. Microsoft raped ISO with their office file formats, leaving the organization in limbo. The whole campaign against the format have raised an army of people, which are furious about the dirty tactics used by Microsoft to get the broken standard through ISO. This anger won’t go away, and I wish good luck to Microsoft to get it adopted by governments. The reputation of Microsoft went down below zero with this process.

(Source)

A bad day for open standards. But the war has just begun. Now that Microsoft has its ISO approval, you can bet that very aggressive lobbying in governments around the world will start, with the aim to introduce “an alternative” (read: successor) to the already widely accepted Open Document Format ODF.