Despite the fact that some of the objections to OOXML sound serious-- the Brazilian contingent alone raised 60 objections-- for Microsoft that may be in the famous words of Ralph Kramden, "a mere bag of shells." [For you youngsters out there that means it is trivial.]

A mere bags of shells indeed - if you can stuff the ISO ballot a little better next time.

The biggest reported technical problem with OOXML is that it cannot freely be used by those creating products that compete with MS Office.

Therefore it is not an Open International Standard in the meaning of the term.

As the French standards body pointed out, in its present form, it is a technical specification for saving documents that can be accessed by Microsoft Office 2007 applications.

As various technical committees pointed out, the saved documents cannot be freely accessed by non MS Office products or by earlier versions of MS Office.

In some cases, they could not be reopened by Office 2007 applications.

The reverse is true of ODF. Open Office has shown how easy it is to implement a completely open XML format for saving documents.

Some technical committees stated that it would be easier for MS to implement ODF than create an entirely new OOXML format, something which is born out by SUN's ODF plugin for Word.

To offer what is in fact a specification to fit a proprietary product, shows that Microsoft wants their Office 2007 suite with its hidden document formats to remain the dominant solution (and by association their Windows OS), despite the known consequences of using proprietary formats for public information in this manner.

The biggest consequence is that who ever controls the method, also has defacto control over the content, something we are starting to see from MS with their Vista implementation.

This is definitely not something Government agencies want and is the main reason why International standards are designed be open and able to be freely used by all.

One of the benefits of standards is that "there are so many of them, you can choose ;-)". Wrong: if the choice is done by dominant Suppliers, right if it is done by the demand (consumers). Regardless of the benefits of each standard per-se for consumers, suppliers like MS choose based on captive market potential. If you are inside the captive market. choose open standard and move out (to openoffice or ibm lotus notes or whatever), or stay with MS if you like it, hey, some people do like to pay more.