Forget Super Tuesday. Consider Super Friday. Super Friday is February 29, the end of the ISO Ballot Resolution Meeting which will decide the fate of Open XML as an ISO standard.

OOXML, or the infamous ISO/IEC DIS 29500, is crawling towards the Ballot Resolution Meeting to see whether it can make the status of International Standard. Now ECMA, the body which hastily (to say the least) decided to make it an industry standard and presented it to ISO with a "fast track" procedure, has reviewed the comments of the national bodies, made a proposal for addressing them.

There are some important questions regarding OOXML’s upcoming ISO bid that Microsoft cannot answer or just simply won’t. From 25-29 February 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland, the ISO community will hold a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) of the National Boards to discuss and vote finally on OOXML as an ISO standard. This article raises questions that Microsoft should answer to the satisfaction of the ISO community as part of the deliberation leading up to the BRM vote.

"...I am aware that I’m making a very long story short here. But I’m doing this on purpose: the conspiracy that Bruce refers could be summarized as Novell engineers hijacking Gnome to serve their own corporate needs, and the problem is, these needs are aligned with the ones of Microsoft. [...] The most important lesson of this is that what matters is the format, not the application. The format creates the network effect and captures users, unless it is open and standard. [...] Apparently some would still like us to believe OOXML is an open standard. Make no mistake, OOXML is not an open standard, just like Christmas is not Easter."

There will be a BRM (Ballot resolution meeting) in Geneva on 25-29 February 2008 to answer the comments by National Standard Boards on OOXML and to resolve issues. Microsoft has set up a situation where many of the shortcomings and thousands of comments which need to be resolved at the BRN will not be addressed. They have closed this process as much as possible and have delayed National Boards from having adequate time to review proposed changes.

Norbert Bollow, founder of OpenISO.org, has just released the OpenISO.org Call For Participation for creating a "problem report" document about OOXML, that can help ISO/IEC national member bodies with evaluating whether the changes that will be decided at the OOXML "Ballot Resolution Meeting" (BRM) in February are sufficient to address OOXML's most serious problems.

Some twenty years ago, information technology vendors began opting out of the accredited standards system with increasing frequency in order to form organizations they called fora, alliances, and (most often) consortia.

ISO certification processes stopped completely after the Open XML debacle. New members are not interested in standards that are not related to Microsoft.