OOXML gets ISO approval

ISO isn't really corrupt per se, it's just a talking shop, like the UN. It exists at the whim
of its member nations. Most major industrialised nations are participating members, and thus
have a vote.

Corruption within the national standards bodies (which is what was actually documented) is an
internal matter. Some countries had robust national standards bodies which looked at this
proposal and rejected it. Some didn't. If yours didn't, you need to be making a fuss about
that. Your country's national standards body is probably responsible for your day-to-day
safety since it sets all sorts of relevant standards, so if it's corrupt and a company like
Microsoft can buy votes, that's a serious issue and you should be able to get some daylight on
it from your national press.

ISO has approved a very large number of standards, some of which are useless. If no-one adopts
this standard (note that so far Microsoft don't implement it) then it achieves nothing except
some bad press for ISO and some mixed press for Microsoft.

> Of course, Microsoft have essentially destroyed the ISO's credibility now
> - not just in software, but for any purpose at all.

You are either very young or very naive. ISO's credibility has not been destroyed at all. It
has rubberstamped or even (gasp!) developed bad standards before.

Some of them have been ignored, e.g. the elder ones of us still remember the struggle between
*/IP (IETF standards) and OSI (ISO standards, most often in the form of X.*). See, ISO did
*not* standardize TCP/IP and some of its member bodies even actively worked against it. ("ISO"
seldom does anything, it's more a kind of clearing house. Its member bodies decide and act.)
An other ISO standard slowly coming are SI units, i.e., the metric system, -- the hell might
freeze over before the US starts to use it.

Other bad standards were not only accepted, but even commonly realized, that's the way
standardization works. Hell, it's not as if other standardization bodies wouldn't make bad
standards either, just look at XML schemata and SOAP from W3C.

And my accusation of naivety is because you seem to believe that anyone outside the narrow
circle of IT desktop/office technology open source proponents will give a rat about that vote.
Please note, the world is larger. ISO standardizes a mind-boggling number of interfaces, and
OOXML is just one of them. Many of them have *much* larger pricetags than an office suite. Do
you really believe that this was the first political pressure that was put on an ISO decision.
A quick search on Google provided
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3739/is_200104/ai... that is from another area
complaining about problems in IEC and approval processes. Did you know about these
standardization problems? If not, why do you expect other technical areas to know about our
problems?

And, to cut a potential argument short: I don't care much about either standard and thus don't
consider myself biased. I find neither OOo nor MS Office good products. In fact, as a member
of the LaTeX team, I have a clear (and biased) viewpoint what's the best authoring and
publishing system around. :-)