" 28 August 2007: about 20 Microsoft partners appeared in the final minutes of yesterday's working meeting at SIS (Swedish Standards Institute) and pushed through a majority for a SIS approval of Microsoft's new OOXML file format as an ISO standard."

Hungary's state Competition Authority raided the offices of Microsoft Corp.'s local subsidiary as part of a probe into the company's relationship with large software distributors. Microsoft used sales conditions and offered software distributors incentives - described as "loyalty discounts" - so they wouldn't offer clients anything but Microsoft Office products.

Late last month, evidence emerged indicating that Microsoft has used financial incentives to influence the outcome of Office Open XML (OOXML) fast-track approval in various national standards bodies. Although ISO ended up voting against fast-track approval for OOXML, the company's efforts have created doubts about the reliability of the standards process.

At a Red Hat retrospective panel on the ODF vs. OOXML struggle panel, a Microsoft representative, Stuart McKee, admitted that ODF had 'clearly won.' The Redmond company is going to add native support of ODF 1.1 with its Office 2007 service pack 2. Its yet unpublished format ISO OOXML will not be supported before the release of the next Office generation.

Microsoft has hailed the ISO's acceptance of the Microsoft Open Office XML despite controversy in standards communities about voting irregularities. The new vote reverses last year's rejection of OOXML. Norway's Standard Norge dismissed members and three staff members reversed a no vote. Other countries also reported OOXML voting problems.

This takes the cake. Alex Brown has just admitted on his Griffin Brown blog and further to ZDNET UK's Peter Judge that Microsoft Office 2007 has failed two OOXML conformance tests he ran. First ZDNET:
In a blog posting this week, Alex Brown, revealed that Microsoft Office 2007 documents do not meet the latest specifications of the ISO OOXML draft standard.

On Friday July 13th, INCITS V1 met via teleconference for 3 hours but failed to reach a 2/3 consensus necessary to recommend an "Approval, with comments" position on Microsoft "Office Open XML" (OOXML) document specification.

Following criticism from the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA) over its ambition to have the Office Open XML (Open XML or OOXML) format accepted as an international (ISO) standard, Microsoft's group product manager for Microsoft Office, Gray Knowlton, spoke with Computerworld about why the world needs two standard document formats.

Remember I told you I've noticed that people who don't support Microsoft's agenda end up the victim of smear campaigns?... The New Zealand Open Source Society is reporting that an employee at Microsoft recently sent an email to one of the technical bodies advising an NB involved in the OOXML ISO process, smearing a man's reputation