Acrimony Reigns at ISO Document Standards Meeting

However, most of the changes were voted on as a bloc, without any discussion. That left some participants and Open XML opponents critical of the voting process. Some also said it's unclear whether there's a consensus within ISO to actually ratify Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) file format as an open standard.

Little Discussion, Much Disgust

"Eighty percent of the changes weren't discussed," said Frank Farance, an IT consultant who led the U.S. delegation to the ballot resolution meeting. "It's like if you had a massive software project and 80 percent of it wasn't run through [quality assurance]. I've never seen anything like it, and I've been doing this for 25 years."

"People here are disgusted," said Andrew Updegrove, a technology attorney and an outspoken critic of Open XML who was in Geneva but didn't take part in the meeting. "The absurdity of trying to [ratify Open XML] by a 'fast track' process became quite apparent."

However, ISO officials defended the voting process. Last Monday, Alex Brown, who in ISO parlance was the meeting's convener, wrote in a response to a blog post by Updegrove that the procedures were "fully in accord" with ISO directives.

More to Be Done

Brown, who is a technical director at a company in the UK, said that many of the changes were minor and that they were grouped together for voting because of time constraints.

Tom Robertson, general manager of interoperability and standards at Microsoft, said there was "a pretty rigorous review" of the issues that mattered most to the people at the meeting. "Not every issue that was raised needed to be discussed face to face," Robertson said.

Open XML won a majority of the votes cast in an initial round of ISO balloting last summer, but not enough to be ratified. A second round of voting started after the meeting and is scheduled to end March 29.