It looks like ISO has accepted Microsoft’s open file format Office Open XML and is set to become standard number DIS 29500. The discussion on both sides of the issue has been heated for a couple of years now, with major companies like IBM and Sun opposing the standard and backing OpenOffice’s ODF, and Microsoft, of course, supporting its own format. I’ve pretty much stayed out of the issue since I don’t pretend to know very much about either formats. All I can say about this is that it is pretty big industry news. This sets the table for improved interoperability between office products. Wikipedia has a long list of applications that support OOXML documents in one way or another. The length of the list is remarkable, considering the format has been available for such a short amount of time. Gone are the days of reverse engineering an opaque binary file, now we just have to read through a 6,045 page specification document…
ISO adopts OOXML format as international standard [Washington Post]
