"Brazil, India, and China, which together count for more than a third of the world's population, all voted against Office Open XML in voting last week before the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Russia was the only member of the so-called BRIC nations to vote in favor of ISO ratification for OOXML."

Where are we now?

Response to new disinformation from the Microsoft camp. Microsoft cheerleaders like Alex Brown and Jesper Lund Stocholm are quite deliberately misinterpreting or mis-presenting a vote related to OOXML by claiming that IBM "supports" OOXML.

The Manila Bulletin Online tells us how the Philippines changed its No vote on OOXML to Yes. Once again there is an indication that when no consensus was reached, the chairman decided to make it Yes. That blatantly happened in Norway, and I can't help but want more details about the Philippines.

Canada has its public statement announcing its OOXML vote and why it voted Disapprove with Comments

Technical Committee 182 decided on August 30th to accept Microsoft format Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Another committee already voted against OOXML last week, but the KT 182 decision is the final vote of Poland sent to ISO on August 31th.

This is different. There is a report by Borys Musielak of PolishLinux.org that Poland met to vote on OOXML on Thursday. Of 45 members of the committee eligible to vote, 24 showed up to vote, and it split almost down the middle, with 12 for, 10 against and 2 abstaining. This is extraordinary, since Poland voted yes in September, despite the technical committee being opposed. I call that progress.

South Africa was the first, but not the last. Now Brazil has sent a letter protesting the adoption of OOXML as an ISO standard also, and Andy Updegrove says he has heard there will be more...

[...]approving a standard normally is a positive process, ie the initiator of the standard has to come out with arguments of why their product is worthy of being a standard. I fail to find any such official Microsoft documents regarding why is OOXML good. Let us demand such documents from Microsoft.