Philip Quinlan is correct in all he says. Votes cast were 87 (51 Yes, 18 No, 18 Abstain), composed as follows :

- Original JTC1 P-Members: 30 ( 8 Yes, 14 No, 8 Abstain)
- Other ISO Member Bodies: 57 (43 Yes, 4 No, 10 Abstain)

"Original JTC1 P-Members" are those who were registered as Participant Members at the end of the contradiction period. By definition, the 57 other voters were not Participants to the process until they very recently applied for upgrading to voting status, as a direct result of the Microsoft issue. To a great extent the upgraders are smaller and third world countries. That has occurred amid widespread accusations of gerrymandering and committee stuffing.

What support there was for OOXML came largely from the US and the above. Despite the shenanigans, ISO proved its worth by rejecting this hopelessly non-standard specification.

Hopefully it will now put its much manipulated voting system in order before the next vote of this kind.

Peter Morton, Edinburgh, UK

The greatest problem with this "open" standard is that it is not open, Microsoft has a virtual monopoly in the operating system and office-suite markets and as a result other vendors must attempt to decode Microsoft's .doc, .xls, .ppt file formats. The primary driver for the move for an open document format was so that if I send a document to a MS-Office user and they could read it and vice versa without me having to purchase MS-Office. The article failed to mention the influx of several countries to the ISO participants panel including Cyprus, Ecuador, Pakistan, Trinidad/Tobago, Uruguay, Venezuela, Jamaica, Lebanon and Turkey. Also failed to mention the allegations of corruption of the process in several countries

Philip Quinlan, Dublin, Ireland

As a 40 year scientific user of computers I have seen many changes both in hardware and in compilers. The production of documents - whether letters, reports, program code, etc - was of no major concern to us. Speed and memory are more relevant.
Now that more of the population want to - or must - use computers, Microsoft has "dumbed down" the operating system with windows so that the lowest common denominator can easily use it while compouding the difficulties of writing compact program code.
The move to Open Software is a good first step, now we need an Open operating system so that people like me can get on with their use of the computer as the fast calculator it was meant to be. Listen up, Microsoft.

Simon E. Bode, Bath, United Kingdom

Latest news:

"In a recent development MSFT spokesman said that, one standard body meets all is not a viable workable solution for the whole world. Mr Tong'n Cheek said that Microsoft will promote an alternative standard body called Open ISO. He said that Microsoft wants its customers to have a choice in international bodies creating standards, choice in standards themselves too. This way users can have various choices like, OpenISO certified OOXML saving MSFT product, or ISO certified OOXML saving MSFT product or, uncertified OOXML saving MSFT product or unsupported ODF saving MSFT product or..."

Joe, Lis, Bon