A technical committee in India has announced that it will oppose ratification of Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark-up Language (OOXML), the new all-purpose document format that the software giant hopes to establish as the dominant format of the coming years.

On September 2^nd 2007, the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) will count votes on whether OOXML should receive official ISO status. The format will pass as a certified standard if 66% of member nations that are eligible to vote approve, and no more than 25% disapprove (members have the right to abstain).

This week, India declared that it would be voting ‘No’ on the standardisation of OOXML, and joins Brazil in its opposition. The Chinese government has already adopted a form the competing Open Office Format, backed by IBM and Sun Microsystems. This defiance from the three emerging superpowers does not bode well for Microsoft.                                                                                          

Most countries to have voted so far, including Germany and Finland, have supported standardisation of the format. But according to India’s Economic Times newspaper, Canada, the Czech Republic, Iran, Japan, Libya, Cuba, New Zealand and the UK are expected to favor ODF despite concerted lobbying from Microsoft.

Writing on his blog, Microsoft spokesperson Sean McBreen explains that the backwards compatibility of OOXML makes it a valuable document format for businesses. However, according to the Foundation for Free Information Infrastructure, which operates the NoOOXML campaign, the format is restrictive to interoperability and unfit for standardisation as it fails to meet ISO requirements. Over 200 technical issues have been raised by member nations.

Microsoft’s McBreen says that while the ratification of OOXML is unlikely to directly impact customer purchasing in the short term, “[over time] there is likely to be a direct impact on the adoption of Microsoft products if [OOXML] is not accepted as a standard that will reduce our ability to compete in the marketplace.”

Report in The Economic Times
Sean McBreen's MSDN blog
NoOOXML.org

Information Age Business Briefing - Extending the information experience - Streamlining information access and delivery in an XML world