One of the things Microsoft gets nailed by customers on is proprietary standards. We saw lots of this objection in the 90's around protocols and Office file formats. Since then I think we've made some pretty significant inroads into changing a lot of that but we still have work to do!

One of those areas was opening up the document format used by Office into an open standard for interoperability - and interoperability is a good thing! To do that the world must get behind it to support Open XML becoming an ISO standard - and in that you have a voice. Australia's turn is now!

Theres three things you can do!

1. Send a letter of support to the local standards body, Standards Australia.   Send it to:

Attention: Alistair Tegart

JTC-1 representative,

Standards Australia
GPO Box 476

SYDNEY NSW 2001

Or....

2. Provide us with a 2-4 sentence statement of support for this standard that can be posted publicly.  Blog it and post comments/email to my blog about it (though make sure we can trackback to your blog)

Or...

3. Register your support at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/

You can make a difference in opening up the document standards!