Standards NZ votes against ISO adoption of OOXML

mudshark writes: Despite a last-minute media carpet-bombing effort from Microsoft featuring quarter-page display ads in the major dailies, coupled with significant astroturf pressure from MS partners, Standards NZ has cast a vote of "no with comments" on the ISO/IEC proposal for adoption of Office Open XML as an international standard. This decision leaves the door open for changing to a "yes" vote in February 2008 if numerous technical considerations are addressed — including the possibility of merging OOXML with the existing standard Open Document Format. As the Tui ads seen across the country would say: "Let's merge OOXML with ODF. Yeah, right."