Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Will OOXML get

Even though there;s still a month left prior to the last votes are tallied, Microsoft;s bid to gain ISO requirements approval for its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format is something but assured.Friday February 29 marked the finish of a week-long ballot-resolution meeting in Geneva, where participants debated whether or not or to not approve Microsoft;s OOXML as an ISO regular. Representatives now have a month to vote. Depending on accounts from some of the attendees of the meeting, it;s difficult to predict what the ultimate outcome will be.Microsoft officials were upbeat in their analysis, with Office Program Supervisor Brian Jones going to date as to say that he was heading out to celebrate soon after the close with the Geneva meeting.“There had been many technical changes the delegates made to really get consensus on a number of the more difficult issues, but all of these passed overwhelmingly once they had been updated. The process really worked (it was very cool).“The meeting closed with clapping and cheering, folks had been really happy about the improved proposals for the specification and it was a very positive experience for me personally.”(However, as Microsoft watchers will recall,Microsoft Office Professional 2007, even when Microsoft lost its bid to fast-track OOXML through the ISO process in September 2007, the company issued a press release that painted that loss as a victory. So it;s tough to rely on Microsoft pronouncements when trying to ascertain what is really happening on the OOXML front.)But others — including a U.S. delegate official head — had been far less upbeat about the ISO standards process or OOXML;s standardization prospects.Computerworld quotes Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation to the ballot-resolution meeting as saying “Eighty percent of the (proposed changes to the OOXML regular) were not discussed.” Farance added, according to Computerworld, “It;s like if you had a massive software project and 80% of it was not run through QA (quality assurance).”According to Andy Updegrove, a standards expert and backer of Open Document Format (ODF), the primary rival to OOXML, the U.S. ended up voting against giving OOXML the ISO standards nod,Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, as did a handful of other countries this week.Sun;s Director of Web Technologies Tim Bray, who attended this week;s ballot-resolution meeting,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, said the ISO process is as broken,Microsoft Office 2007 Professional, if not more so, than OOXML itself. (Sun is also an ODF backer.)“This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen.Their reputation, in my eyes, is in tatters.”When I made my annual predictions for Microsoft for the coming year, I was pretty certain that Microsoft would find a way to get the ISO standards nod for OOXML,Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, given how much of a financial priority that standardization is for the company. But now it;s looking like ISO standardization for Microsoft;s document format isn;t a shoo-in.What do you think will happen, once the votes are tallied?