There is a reason I still get a big blue rash
Earlier this week, Open XML won ISO approval. By any objective measure, it won handily. 86% of the participants voted for the standard.
Does that mean that 16% of the voting countries are run by IBM officials?
One could make the case that it does. Jan van den Beld's post provides far more evidence more eloquently than I ever could: http://janvandenbeld.blogspot.com/2008/04/hypocrisy.html. A few highlights:
"I can see why IBM opposes more voices (at least those that don’t agree with its commercially motivated views). It has enjoyed unparalleled influence in international standardization for decades and may not now like more voices and decision makers in this process. Its allies could not have been clearer about that commercial agenda– to force the purchase of their products by blocking governments from procuring Microsoft Office, regardless of technical merit or actual demand."
"When IBM talks about independence, it really means that national standards bodies should be independent of anyone who disagrees with IBM’s position.
But, the only way to get the full picture is to read his post, including the evidence to which he provides links.
For my own standpoint, I have to look at this from the technology standpoint. I've looked inside a few Office XML documents. They are not simple, but they are understandable (if you understand XML). Can any company (or individual) create a parser to read or write Office XML documents? Sure. What's stopping you? Your technical skill might, but legal restrictions and closed formats can't. And to me, data transparency is more "open" that code transparency. If I can see the data (in XML format, possibly) I can certainly figure it out. Even if I can't see the internal algorithms inside Office, I can work with it's files. That's much more important than being able to see the code. Are you, or your customers, going to re-write your office apps? Probably not. But, does an open format make changing vendors, or creating more addons easier? Certainly. Open XML gives us that.
In fact, at this point, I would make the case that it's easier to work with office documents stored in Open XML than it is to work with google docs stored in the cloud. Can you program against google docs? Can you programmatically retrieve your data? If so, can you understand the internal format, and process those documents with your own algorithms? I don't believe so.