If you had paid attention to the whole debacle you may understand why people are upset. It's a poor standard, it hasn't been implemented anywhere (including microsoft office), and it does nothing but give Microsoft the go ahead to convince uninformed managers that using their office product will comply with the ISO requirements that many businesses have. If it had been an actual technical review it would have failed, but Microsoft pulled a lot of strings and got it through. So now Microsoft will have a proprietary file format that no one can implement and stifle real competition yet again for the foreseeable future.

Btw, I love quite a few Microsoft products, and program in .net, that doesn't mean I'm going to condone shady business practices.

Did you even read the article -- it seems to be funny more than anything. :)

I didn't say that OOXML is the *best* standard or even a good one, for that matter.

Isn't ODF an ISO standard too? If ODF is better (it could be; I'm very neutral (read: don't care) to the issue), why would it not be able to compete against OOXML?

The reason ODF won't be able to compete is an education/business issue, not a technical one. Many businesses use Microsoft Office for their documents and Office does not support the ODF file format without a plugin, so to be able to interact with your clients you must use the same formats that they use. This obviously means you're going to have to get copies of Office for your business if you intend to interact with other businesses that use it (without looking like some kind of document format evangelist), which cascades and creates vendor lock in to Microsoft products. This is, of course exactly what Microsoft, or any business for that matter would want; and has been their practice for some time now.

There's nothing to prevent a 3rd party organization from making a black-box reverse-engineered program that is compatible with proprietary document formats. OSS advocates often tout that it's better than paid software because they have millions of coders who can do things far more efficiently than any company... so what's their complaint, exactly? What's stopping them from making a document editor that's 100% Office compatible?

The entire purpose of a standard is so that you don't have to reverse engineer it to be compatible, saying they'll have to reverse engineer it is just admitting that the standard is completely worthless.

Also, if you think reverse engineering something for 100% compatibility is so easy I highly suggest you join a field in which your talents can be used in that manner.

Firstly, your point was about proprietary formats, and so was my comment.

Second, I'm not saying it's easy for one person to reverse engineer a standard as big as office. However, every single time I talk to OSS advocates, they claim that OSS is far superior to proprietary software because they have an army of millions of developers who can crush any product out there because they have such manpower. My point was, if this was true, why do they complain so much about proprietary formats? Surely, with an army of millions of coders who work for free, it would be absolutely no problem for them, right? So what's their complaint?

No, my point was about OOXML, which is supposed to be a standard but is in fact a proprietary format that will have to be reverse engineered. You're also throwing out silly red herrings that have nothing to do with the argument at hand. You obviously have an axe to grind against OSS developers, and I could personally care less.