India, along with South Africa (SA) and Brazil, has opposed the standardization move of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for the Microsoft’s Office Open XML document (OOXML) format. Microsoft has recently approached ISO to recognize their OOXML format as a world standard in the fields of electronic documents. The format, as demanded by Microsoft, was finally recognized on March 29 last through a voting under the aegis of a designated high power committee of ISO.

In the absence of consensus amongst the constituent member countries for approving OOXML as world standard, ISO’s Joint Technical Committee 1 and the International Electro-technical Commission (IEC) went ahead with voting, where Microsoft won giving a new software challenge to it’s competitors. Though, the voting was imminent to decide on the issue, but the manner and speed with which it was conducted has given enough scopes of strong criticisms from different world bodies including India, Brazil and SA.

India has already filed an appeal opposing the ISO’s voting decision. Objection of India and other appealing countries is not primarily focused on the technicality of the OOXML and it’s potential; rather, it is mainly attributed to the procedure of ISO’s voting. The appealing countries have raised their concerns saying the issue of OOXML standardization could have been more elaborately scrutinized before reaching the highly significant decision.

Factually, an initial voting of ISO had rejected the draft proposal of making Microsoft’s OOXML as standard for electronic documents. But, due to some unknown reasons, the draft was approved through a ballot resolution meeting (BMR). Through the 5 days long BMR session, hundreds of editorial changes had been incorporated before finally allotting ISO standard to the OOXML. Of course, the final version is yet not been circulated to all concerned adding further discontents amongst the unhappy groups.