From the outside, the debate over whether the International Organization for Standardization should formally ratify Microsoft's Office Open XML format as international standard DIS 29500 seems almost completely political. And during last month's ballot resolution meeting (BRM), the reports on how that debate was proceeding were so wild and uncorroborated as to be almost unintelligible.
source:

[betanews.com...]

The ISO is possibly going to standardize a special XML schema that Microsoft invented, a schema which will make documents authored with Microsoft Office products more accessible to each other and to 3rd party software developers.

Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc will all use a common XML schema to describe their data content.

Some don't think Microsoft's schema should become an ISO standard. Some argue that the schema just isn't good. I'm sure the technical details of this keep many people up at night arguing over coma-inducing details like namespace naming conventions, the right elements to use to define "dropcaps" in Word...

The debate has spawned an anti-ooxml petition with over 86,000 signatures (noooxml.org)

Microsoft promises that this format will be open, free, now and forever.
source: [microsoft.com...]