Today many newspaper in Sweden reports how several companies in last minute has bought themselves a place in the Swedish Institue of Standards (SIS) in order to make shure the OOXML from Micriosoft becomes standard disregarding the preparing work done within SIS.
Update: The SIS opted for not voting at all at the ISO meeting due to this controversy.
Except for associating this to corruption, it also points to the fact that Microsoft no longer seems to be able to compete on the service it delivers or trust the quality of it´s own products.
Swedish blogs and articles:
English blogg/article:
http://www.peterkrantz.com/2007/hijacked-ooxml-vote
And the list of the companies quickly buying the possibility to vote: http://mikrofoncaught.blogspot.com/2007/08/svenska-standardiseringsinsitutet-sis.html
The end?
OOXML has now been (temporarilly?) rejected as an ISO standard. The suggested standard contained too many flaws.
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070904082606181
Remember that the ISO standardisation process takes time and that Microsoft worked very hard to spped up the process significantly. Now they have to face the fact they rushed things too fast in order to get a standard instead of getting a good standard.