ISO rejects India’s appeal against Microsoft’s OOXML

India has faced a setback in the world of software standards. The International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) has rejected appeals by four countries, including India, to reject Microsoft's Office Open XML formats as an international standard. No further appeals can be made against the decision by two technical boards, so ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology - Office Open XML formats can find its way to publication in coming weeks.

In a press release yesterday, the ISO said appeals by Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela had failed to muster the support of two thirds of the members of its technical boards.

ISO initially approved OOXML in April following a highly controversial fast-track review process. The decision was condemned by national standards bodies from the aforementioned four countries. These governments attempted to appeal the approval, citing procedural irregularities during the ballot resolution meeting and technical flaws in the standard itself. (See: ISO puts off standardisation of Microsoft's Open Office XML format)

A technical management board that was assembled to assess the complaints has now formally rejected the appeals. The board has sided with ISO's leadership, which has argued that the OOXML process was executed in conformance with the will and expectations of a majority of the participants.

"None of the appeals from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela received the support for further processing of two-thirds of the members of the ISO Technical Management Board and IEC Standardization Management Board, as required by ISO/IEC rules governing the work of their joint technical committee ISO/IEC JTC 1," said ISO in a statement.

Acknowledging the debate over the ratification of Office Open XML, the standards body added, "Experiences from the ISO/IEC 29500 process will also provide important input to ISO and IEC and their respective national bodies and national committees in their efforts to continually improve standards development policies and procedures."

Critics say that OOXML is inferior to Open Document Format (ODF), a competing format that is already backed by ISO and is more closely aligned with existing standards. Microsoft faced heavy scrutiny during the fast-track process and has been accused of engaging in abusive practices, ranging from committee-stuffing to vote buying.

While Indian software giants like Wipro, Infosys and TCS had expressed support for Microsoft's standard and has been joined by umbrella body NASSCOM, major Microsoft competitors like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Google have sided with ODF.

Microsoft downplays the viability of ODF and says that OOXML is important because it was designed to support all of the functionality included in the company's dominant Office suite and to facilitate "round-trip compatibility" with Microsoft's widely-used legacy binary formats. Although Microsoft has largely been dismissive of ODF, market pressure has compelled the company to reverse its policy and integrate ODF into Office 2007.

ISO is a global network of national standards institutes from 157 countries. It has a current portfolio of more than 17 000 standards for business, government and society. ISO's standards make up a complete offering for all three dimensions of sustainable development - economic, environmental and social.

ISO standards provide solutions and achieve benefits for almost all sectors of activity, including agriculture, construction, mechanical engineering, manufacturing, distribution, transport, medical devices, information and communication technologies, the environment, energy, quality management, conformity assessment and services.

The debate appears to be a proxy for product competition in the marketplace, note analysts. It is significant in part because it will influence the future success of Microsoft Office - one of Microsoft's largest and most profitable product families.

ISO approval also means government business for Microsoft since governments worldwide, including India, prefer standards that are ratified by bodies such as the ISO.

Governments are wary of holding digital data in proprietary formats, which could make them hostage to a software vendor. States such as Delhi, Kerala and others from the North-East are heavy adopters of ODF file formats which are open and free (excluding maintenance and support).

Non-governmental and legacy Microsoft Office users, on the other hand, are unlikely to bother about which file formats their office applications use, given that Microsoft Office still has a 90 per cent market share in most countries.