The International Organization for Standardization has voted against a proposal to fast-track Microsoft's Office Open XML format as an international standard. Here's how the vote went: all 41 of the of the countries that had worked on the proposal participated in the vote. There were 17 "yes" votes, 15 "no" votes, and 9 abstentions. Without counting the abstentions, that works out to 53.12 percent approval, far short of the two-thirds majority needed. Of the 87 national standards bodies voting, 18 voted against OOXML, leaving OOXML just shy of the 75 percent threshold for that vote.

The run up to the vote had been long and contentious, with allegations that Microsoft had tried to stack the vote in its favor aired last week. In Sweden, 20 new companies joined the Swedish Standards Institute after receiving assurances from the software giant that they would receive "market assistance" and "extra support in the form of Microsoft resources" for joining and voting to approve OOXML.

There have also been arguments against OOXML based on the format's technical merits. Linux Foundation initiative manager John Cherry said last week that there were still a number of technical issues with the format that have yet to be addressed.

Microsoft is putting a positive spin on the results, noting that 74 percent of the member countries supported OOXML's ratification. The company notes that the standardized Open Document Format used in OpenOffice.org's office suite had a similar level of support at the same stage of development and that it expects OOXML to gain approval at the next round of voting.

"We are extremely delighted to see that 51 ISO members, representing 74 percent of the qualified votes, have already voiced their support for ISO ratification of Open XML, and that many others have indicated they will support ratification once their comments are resolved in the next phase of the ISO process," said Tom Robertson, general manager for Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft in a statement. "The high quality of the Open XML format will be improved as a result of this process, and we take seriously our role in working within the Ecma technical committee to address the comments received."

With the vote going against Microsoft, the proposed standard for OOXML will have to revised in order to take into account the "with comments" votes. This could entail changes to the file format itself, which would then require updates to Office 2007 in order to make it fully compliant with any revisions to the OOXML format. There will be a week-long Ballot Resolution Meeting held in February or March of 2008 where further work on the standard will take place. Another vote on OOXML will then be held at the end of the meeting.

Further reading