OOXML as an ISO standard. What a joke.

(April 4, 2008)

Recently, OOXML was approved as an ISO standard. At first, I thought it's okay, even though it might increase cost for software development to support two standards at the same time. However, once I found this article: http://www.robweir.com/blog/2008/03/disharmony-of-ooxml.html, I think it is really embarrassing to have OOXML as an ISO standard for document. This implies that even Microsoft itself cannot enforce reasonable standards among its own products and it did impose difficulty in software development to itself and the outside world.

I really wonder what the committee was thinking during ballot casting.