Yesterday ECMA International approved Office Open XML Formats as an Ecma standard and voted to submit the new standard to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for consideration as an ISO standard. I talked about Microsoft supporting interoperability with the ISO approved Open Document Format earlier this year.
Brian Jones at Microsoft has some behind the scenes information about this recent development and his post yesterday is a worthy read.
Earlier this week there were cries from the MAC community that Microsoft Office for MAC would not support the new Open XML format and now the interoperability between MAC and PC users was eliminated 
Well, Microsoft is going to release Office 2007 for MAC next year and shortly they will provide free file converters for MAC Office users to be able to read the new file formats until the next version of Office for MAC is released.
Anyway, I think the approval by ECMA is a good thing. As long as vendors like IBM and Microsoft have a vested interest (read $$$$) in promoting their specific format or standards embraced, we will have to live with more than one format or standard. I don’t see the big deal as long as these are interoperable and approved by bodies like ECMA and ISO.
What do you think?
Something can be approved as a standard and still be mired in legal limbo; I think standards are important, but I also think that open standards are important. Remember that Microsoft’s binary office formats were a de facto standard for years, and enjoyed an uncontested popularity, with out without international standards bodies. But they were largely undocumented binary formats, wholly owned by a litigious corporation, which means that your level of access to your data could be directly by the amount of money you paid for software licenses.
OpenXML purports to be open and royalty-free, but regardless of the quality of Office, no one seems to trust that kind of promise. Hopefully, nothing at all will come of it.
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I agree with your observations. I think times have changed significantly over the last few years and the industry will not tolerate lip service to standards. I do not think Microsoft can afford to ignore the evolution toward open standards and data transparency.