Norway asks to suspend its ‘Yes’ vote on OOXML
Members of the Norwegian technical committee that voted to ratify Microsoft's OOXML document format as an ISO standard are protesting that decision even before the full results of the standards body's vote on the technology have been announced.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's push to make OOXML an ISO standard has been bruising from the start: the format failed to win approval in the US over the summer, and in September 2007 ISO voted to reject OOXML outright, a decision Google publicly welcomed. The revival came amid controversy — Wired reported allegations that Microsoft bullied and bribed its way through the process — and now the ballot's legitimacy is being challenged from inside a national body itself. Norway's request to suspend its own 'Yes' vote, lodged by members of its technical committee before full results are even announced, signals that the fight over Office's file format is no longer just about technology but about whether the ISO process itself was gamed.
First-order effects
- Norway's ISO vote is now formally contested by its own technical committee members, throwing one national 'Yes' into doubt and forcing ISO to address an internal protest before finalizing results.
- Microsoft faces renewed scrutiny of how it secured national body votes, with dissent coming not from rivals but from within the committees that ratified the format.
Second-order effects
- Other national bodies whose votes were secured under similar circumstances could face parallel internal challenges, potentially flipping the ballot outcome or forcing re-votes.
- The open-standards camp gains a procedural weapon — documented dissent inside a ratifying committee — that strengthens arguments for preferring ODF and alternative formats in government procurement.
Third-order effects
- If vendor-driven campaigns to stack standards votes become the accepted playbook, trust in formal standards bodies erodes and de facto vendor formats may win by default regardless of what ISO certifies.
- Governments and enterprises may shift toward procurement rules that treat certification as insufficient on its own, weighing process integrity and genuine multi-vendor implementation alongside the standard's letter.
The trend: This is one data point in the broader struggle over whether document formats and other core interoperability standards get set through legitimate multi-stakeholder processes or through vendor muscle applied to nominally independent standards bodies.