Universal Interoperability Council

Circumstantial evidence is mounting of one or more private deals having been struck to approve DIS-29500 Office Open XML ("OOXML") as an international standard, a deal that may have played a role in several key national standardization bodies changing their voting position to approve OOXML.

If DIS-29500 ("OOXML") is approved by JTC 1, that is not the end of file format war; it is only the beginning.

In late 2007, an article by OASIS attorney Andy Updegrove claimed that W3C Compound Document Formats: [i] are non-editable formats; [ii] are not designed for conversions to other formats; and [iii] are therefore unsuitable as office formats. Updegrove could not have been more wrong.

UPDATE — I sent an email to Bob Sutor with a link to this article, which led to him posting my comment discussed below and explaining that my post was diverted by the Spam filter on his blog. We had a private email conversation about his new "real names" policy.