[This post will just have to be improved very soon.  More links have to be
added, and maybe a few images, too.  But Sir Francis beckons now for brews
and grub at 219 No Tran Long, yet again.  :D  Please pardon the inevitable
typos and awkwardness.]

According to GesmerUpdegrove LLP's <http://www.gesmer.com/>
ConsortiumInfo<http://www.consortiuminfo.org/> Standards
Blog <http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/>, Microsoft's OOXML just
lost the vote for acceptance by International Standards Organization (ISO)
as an international standard, leaving the OASIS/OpenOffice ODF standard as
the world's sole globally-approved office-document standard.

The near-term implication, assuming no reversal of the vote, seems to be
that digital office documents will now enjoy a single, open standard under
which any company, anywhere competitively build information-systems
applications.

The ODF standard could thus provide a common global standard for working
with office documents just as HTML has long so successfully provided the
same for pages in the Internet's World Wide Web.  (See comments by
Canonical, Ubuntu Linux' Mark Shuttleworth in a Vietnam video-conference
transcript about the same, near here <http://blog.ngowiki.net/>.)

Of this hardly insignificant event, Andrew Updegrove wrote on the Standard
Blog, PDT.05:31.Tue.04.Sep.2007.AD, 'The actual numbers for the final tally
are now what you could rightly call "encouraging."  All 41 P members voted,
with the following breakdown:  17 yes, 15 no, and 9 abstain.  Or, as the ISO
press release more neutrally described the result':

 Approval requires at least 2/3 (i.e. 66.66 %) of the votes cast by national
bodies participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 to be positive; and no more than 1/4 (
i.e. 25 %) of the total number of national body votes cast negative. Neither
of these criteria were achieved, with 53 % of votes cast by national bodies
participating in ISO/IEC JTC 1 being positive and 26 % of national votes
cast being negative.

As Updegrove notes in the outset of his post, the New York Times
conspicuously just ran an piece by Kevin J O'brien headlined, "Microsoft
Favored to Win Open Document
Vote<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/technology/04soft.html>",
04.Sep.2007, New York (03.Sep, Berlin) -- which now erases most of the
doubts i at least had about the NYT's neocon establishment slant since i
read a recent interview with Seymour
Hersh<http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/73/It_Will_All_Fall_Down_A_Conversa...>following
Bush Jr's recent self-serving comparison of the USA's invasion of
Iraq to its regrettable invasion of Vietnam.

Another highly informative, if potentially biased piece on the MS OOXML ISO
approval bid can be found at the Boycott Novell blog, "Has Microsoft
'Bought' the Vote for OOXML in
Vietnam?<http://boycottnovell.com/2007/08/27/vietnam-ooxml/>",
27.Aug.2007.   The post's question-veiled proposition is supported by a lot
of apparently credible links and what looks at first glance to be a fairly
well-rounded argument.

In fact, it was via a post at the Boycott Novell blog, "It's Final and
Official: ODF is the Only ISO
Standard<http://boycottnovell.com/2007/09/04/ooxml-failed/>",
04.Sep.2007, that Updegrove's post was first found.