According to sources close to the situation, a closed-door meeting hosted by the ISO in Geneva to hammer out a consensus on whether a Microsoft document format should become an international standard descended into near chaos this week. Although the event was supposed to help ISO members address concerns that prevented them from approving the document format as an ISO standard in September (MS lacked a two-thirds majority), the ballot resolution meeting soon became bogged down in bureaucracy as the delegates struggled with more than a thousand points of order, as well as the 6,000 pages of code that define Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format.
"They spent an entire day discussing how they would go about the process. With the massive amount of work they have to do, most are frustrated that they spent 20 percent of their time determining how they were going to vote," said one source. "There just is not enough time to cover the large number of problems in the document. I believe that a lot of the nations are frustrated with the process in general."
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