Those dumb South Africans don’t just get it seems to be Microsoft’s senior director of interoperability’s Jason Matusow message in his blog posting of May 19th.

"There is no question that all over the world the competing interests in the Open XML standardization process are going to use all tactics available to them within the rules." - Microsoft's Director of Corporate Standards Jason Matusow. Well, you have to hand it to Microsoft. They are nothing if not thorough, and leave as little to chance as possible.

Microsoft's plans of having its OOXML document format accepted as a national standard were thwarted by the South African Bureau of Standards in a conclusive vote against the move in a meeting yesterday.

The South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) on Friday approved the Open Document Format (ODF) as an official national South African standard. The adoption of ODF by South Africa opens the way for the businesses and government to adopt ODF more widely in their processes. ODF is already an international standard, approved by the International Standards Organisation, or ISO.

In the wake of the release of the South African government's Minimum Interoperability Standards (MIOS) for information systems document, Tectonic asked Microsoft SA's platform strategy manager, Paulo Ferreira how this would impact on the company and its drives to promote the Office Open XML (OOXML) format.

Open standards are critical in ensuring that the South African government both avoids vendor lock-in and promotes democracy. This is according to South Africa’s minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula.

Microsoft's comments appear to be backfiring in one place while absorbed peacefully by ZDNet.

Whenever I write about Microsoft here I usually get a few comments asking me, with varying degrees of politeness, why I am wasting electrons on this subject on a site devoted to GNU/Linux. The reason I do this – and why I am about to do it again – is that whether we like it or not, Microsoft remains probably the single most important external factor in the free software world.

Recently I accidentally went to a short promotional Microsoft presentation (non-US) about OOXML for work...I came away from that presentation with the impression that Microsoft as a company, and especially at the executive level, doesn't actually have a clear understanding of what an Open Standard is.