So here are some "Key Messages" from Microsoft's standards team circa 2003 (doing battle with the Australian parliament no doubt) [Emphasis added]:

• An open standard is a publicly available specification which details certain technical functionality that may be implemented in different products and services.  It is adopted in an open, consensus-based process and must satisfy other criteria for transparency, ease of access, and broad implementation as described below.



• Open standards exist to facilitate interoperability and data exchange across various products and services in a marketplace of multiple, competing implementations, while ensuring that certain minimum requirements are met.



• Other types of standards (e.g., “proprietary standards”) and market-based mechanisms exist and are currently used to facilitate interoperability.  However, open standards ensure the highest level of interoperability across the widest range of competing products and services.

We eventually found out that if any changes affected current implementations it would certainly be rejected. This seriously compromised any elegant solutions, and it forced us to be mindful of the "existing corpus of documents" in the wild. I personally don't believe that that should be our problem, but there was a large and vocal voting bloc which would oppose any changes to the spec which would 'break' Ecma 376.

This was why appeasing Ecma had to happen. Even though they rushed their Ecma International Standard, and Microsoft took the risk in shipping Microsoft Office 2007 last year, we now have to bear the burden of having to support its limitations. This also means that future maintenance changes would get harder and harder.

Lebech said Denmark considers OOXML an open standard, regardless whether it is approved by the ISO. "It would be impossible
for us to use only ISO standards if we want to fulfill the goal of creating interoperability in the government sector," he
said.

The Danish Parliament also mandated that public agencies consider the cost of using open formats. One of the main reasons
OOXML was included is because Denmark is heavily dependent on document management systems that are integrated with Microsoft's
Office products, Lebech said.

Denmark also found that requiring agencies to only use ODF would have been too expensive, mostly because of the cost of converting
documents into ODF, Lebech said.

"We wouldn't have been able to only support ODF," Lebech said. "It wouldn't have been cost neutral."

A Savage Journey …