Microsoft's Open XML standard may gather enough votes to pass as a certified an ISO standard, CNET reported today, but the actual official vote count will only be announced on Monday. Almost 90 national bodies have to vote on the issue in the ballot which closed Saturday night.

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-done:

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

In early March, a stunning number of over 100 delegates from 32 countries attended the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva, which 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).