There have been big ructions in the usually sedate world of international technical standards this past week, stirred by news of a big victory by Microsoft and OOXML.

OOXML (Office Open XML) is Microsoft’s standard for documents and underpins everything created by users of its widely adopted Word software. The company has been pushing for OOXML to be ratified as a standard by the International Organisation for Standardising (ISO) which is responsible for keeping such things consistent around the world.

Last week the ISO released its ruling that OOXML would indeed become a ratified standard, joining the likes of HTML and PDF. Naturally Microsoft is more than a little pleased at the decision as it will allow large organisations and governments to continue using Word, safe in the knowledge that their documents are based on an approved format.

However there’s always another side to such things, and in this case it’s been occupied by organisations who see the Microsoft push as an evil attempt to further its world domination. They argue that OOXML is a proprietary standard and, as such, not suitable for ratification by the ISO.

The anti-Microsoft crowd say the company has been too pushy in getting its standard through the certification process. This, they say, stymied debate and resulted in a flawed decision.

They’ve obviously been pleading their case to someone who listens because the European Commission’s antitrust regulatory body has already sent query letters to several European countries to ask about the approval process. The investigation could take some time.

What concerns them the most is that the ISO approval will almost certainly allow OOXML to overtake OpenDocument and become the preferred global format for documents.

But so what if it does? Just because the standard is a creation of Microsoft doesn’t make it technically inferior to an open source rival. Millions of people around the world create documents based on OOXML every day. That’s not going to change.

What does change is that the organisations they work for can be confident those documents will survive into the future. If they were to use a non-ratified standard, there’s nothing to say that documents created now may become unreadable by future versions of software applications.

A knee-jerk reaction by open source apostles is predicable, but doesn’t help to move the world forward. Let’s face the fact that Microsoft has a dominant position when it comes to document creation software. You might not like it, but it’s not about to change anytime soon.

So, ratifying the standard on which those documents are created makes commercial sense. Let’s put the sport of Microsoft bashing to one side for the moment and move on.