As you must have heard by now, Microsoft has resorted to gutter-level tactics in its race to have a monopoly enabler approved as a standard. It gets worse.

Open source lobby fury over Office format fast-track

Open source lobby fury over Office format fast-track

The duo claim the process means Europe is being 'railroaded' into accepting an 'inadequate' standard.

This gives even less time for criticism to be expressed and rebuttals revisited, through documents such as that which Groklaw has just produced:

Others have expressed that the ISO standardization of Ecma 376 in its present state would result in an international standard that no vendor other than Microsoft could fully implement. And still others expressed doubts whether a Microsoft-sponsored plugin for its office suite will be able to provide sufficient fidelity in conversions/transformations between Ecma 376 and ISO/IEC 26300.

Some of these recent developments have "corruption" written all over them. It should not be surprising though. With the future Office lockins, there are tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in stake.