Microsoft encounters difficulties in its struggle to make its Office Open XML an international standard, but it is, nevertheless, alleging hard to see progress. At the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva this week, the OOXML Proposed Dispositions were overwhelmingly rejected by the delegations. This effectively means that OOXML will not be addressed within the "Fast Track" process to become a standard.

A stunning number of over 100 delegates from 32 countries attended the meeting in Geneva, who had to resolve the even more amazing 1,100 (yes, more than one thousand) comments registered by the 87 National Bodies which voted last summer with respect to Microsoft's specification that itself exceeds... 6,000 (yes, six thousand) pages. The BRM was hosted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

"They spent an entire day discussing how they would go about the process. With the massive amount of work they have to do, most are frustrated that they spent 20 percent of their time determining how they were going to vote," said a Reuters source. "There just is not enough time to cover the large number of problems in the document. I believe that a lot of the nations are frustrated with the process in general," the source told Reuters.

OOXML, the default file-saving format of Microsoft Office 2007, is actually a rival to an already approved open standard, the already ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF). A lot of experts argue that having two competing similar open standards defeats the purpose of having open formats in the first place. Others allege that Microsoft built the format on purpose very complicated so it can't be fully translated into another format.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that Microsoft appears to have presented the format half-baked:

"Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed," said Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation, which voted against the changes, to Computerworld.

"It's like if you had a massive software project and 80% of it was not run through QA. It's a big problem," Farance continued. "I've never seen anything like this, and I've been doing this for 25 years."