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In an internal poll to determine the position United States should take on Microsoft's request for Office Open XML (OOXML) approval, the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) was one vote shy of the nine required to recommend the format to the International Standards Organization (ISO) as a standard.

The competing OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance's initial members include IBM Corp., Oracle Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.. The team is currently focussing on further evangelising the OpenDocument electronic file format in Asia and across the world. A group of more than 35 U.S. and international IT vendors, organizations, academic institutions and industry bodies are members of the alliance.

Of the organizations that participated in the poll, reps from Apple, Intel, Sony, EMC, HP, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the Electronic Industries Alliance voted for Microsoft. IBM, Oracle, Lexmark, the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, GS1 US, and Farance voted against. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) abstained due to "the divergent viewpoints of key IEEE members.

IBM said, "it is voting "NO" because they are substantial technical issues/comments(min 476), IPR issues, accessibility comments and the JTC 1 Directives are clear that in order to be assured that your comments will be addressed in a satisfactory manner you should vote "NO"..IBM is willing to change the vote to a YES if the US changes its position to a "NO" with comments". Oracle added, "The appropriate approach is to make approval of the specification conditional upon the satisfactory resolution of the large number of issues identified during the public review period. Section 9.8 of the JTC 1 Directives, Votes on Fast-track DISs, states that: “Conditional approval should be submitted as a disapproval vote.” If there is a subsequent vote to Disapprove ISO/IEC DIS 29500 with comments, Oracle will vote YES. Furthermore, if the JTC 1 Ballot Resolution process now scheduled for early 2008 satisfactorily addresses the comments, Oracle will support changing the US vote on ISO/IEC DIS 29500 to APPROVE."

While this is a considerable setback for Microsoft, it does not halt anything -- it merely slows down the ISO standardization process for OOXML. INCITS has until September 2 to decide whether it will support Open XML within the JTC-1, but the latest poll shows this will not happen unless Microsoft can influence some of those who voted negative. This could also create an opportunity for ODF to establish itself as the format of choice.