Open XML standards process is a farce

How many Office document standards does the world really need. Surely the answer is one.

When a perfectly good standard already exists (ODF) and it is can be supported by all the tools - why does the world need another standard. It is just irresponsible.

Politicking within countries (e.g. paying organisations within countries to vote) and to getting countries with little in the issues of outcome to vote (Cf. the recent entry to JTC-1 of those technology power houses: Malta, Côte d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Pakistan, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay, and Venezuela) is ridiculous.

ODF allows the exchange and retrieval of information in office documents.

It reusing existing standards - (instead of reinventing the wheel or using proprietary technologies) like HTML, Dublin Core, SVG, MathML, XForms, XLS:FO, XLink and SMIL. The next version supports RDF-based meta-data - so developers familiar with any of these standards can apply their knowledge to ODF. It also internally reuses concepts (e.g. the definition of a table in a spreadsheet, is almost identical to the definition of a table in a text document - so code written for processing a spreadsheet table can be reused for a text table). The reuse of standards and concepts makes ODF manageable and easy to learn.