Microsoft's Open XML is now a Standard

This just off the press. And no April Fool's joke, it got slashdotted to me.

The ISO approved Microsoft's Open XML as a standard putting it in the same league as PDF, HTML and ODF. For those who haven't been following the debate, Microsoft has been lobbying for this for more than a year now ("over 14 months of intense review", according to MSFT) and fighting opposition from IBM and Sun.

The implications:

• This gives Office 2007 a big boost, marketing wise. With competition coming in from online office tools by the likes of Google and Zoho, having control over a standard is a big deal. (Zoho supports OOXML currently, btw.)
• Apple, Novell, and even IBM now are writing apps that support OOXML.
• It will setback the adoption of Open source Office tools in the mainstream; national bodies of countries vote for these ISO standards.
  

Why should you care about this? If you have anything to do with writing applications for document management, content management, office business applications, interoperability, this is a format you need to understand. More work for us to do.

Problem is, OOXML is still buggy. From Rob's article

Among the defects are some rather serious ones such as:

• storage of plain text passwords in database connection strings
• Undefined mappings between CSS and DrawingML
• Errors in XML Schema definitions
• Dependencies of proprietary Microsoft Internet Explorer features
• Spreadsheet functions that break with non-Latin characters
• Dependencies on Microsoft OLE method calls
• Numerous undefined terms and features

The April fool's joke on this has to be from Linux fans.