What is to be done?
ISO has in a sense put itself in an awkward position here by already approving the rival OpenDocument format as an ISO standard. This makes it harder to reject OOXML, and at the same time makes it difficult to approve OOXML, since it competes with an existing ISO standard. Generally, I'm unhappy with how closely these two standards are tied to existing software. What I would really have liked to see was for OpenDocument and OOXML both to be dropped, and the two communities to sit down and work out a common agreed format that is not tied to any existing software. The Chinese UOF format, for example, might have served as the starting point for this. ODA has also been suggested. Unfortunately, this requires a political will that does not seem to be present, and so this seems unlikely for now.
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