BSI is an Institution, not an Institute. Also, you don't need the "the". I used to edit standards there, so I should know.

With enough money you can get anything passed. Sad, yes. 

But really if Open Office can catch up to MS Office feature and performance-wise, then they will win and odf will win. If these people were more worried about their product and less worried about a half-open standard..... well who knows.

Dan
Microsoft is not trying to approve .doc, .xls and .ppt format as ISO standards, therefore who cares. 
The protests are against approval of the "non-perfect" (as you said) format OOXML as an ISO standard, since it has some issues preventing it to be called truly open ISO standard. 

So we need to fight as much as we can against the approval of the questionable format, and only after Microsoft will fix it, (to make true OPEN standard and not the "description" of how MS Office will save the documents) it could be considered as the contender for the ISO approval. 

And on philosophical note - MS Office is a very good cash cow for MS. Who want to kill the goose which brings golden eggs? Microsoft will do anything, including dirty tricks to avoid making truly open ISO standard out of OOXML. 

They are official monopoly which tries to pedal their lock-in formats as the international standard.

I hope that ISO body will reverse their politically influenced, lobbied decision on OOXML format, otherwise we will have A LOT of legal fights everywhere against ISO local bodies. 
And eventually MS will loose the battle anyway, they are SCO or IBM (whichever you like) of 21st century in my humble opinion.

.doc, .xls and .ppt are not ISO standards but defacto standards. No one ever got to vote on them and they have not been certified as standards. Many people are not happy with those closed standards hence the need for MS to go to the ISO, hat in hand, volish trickery under hat.

How OOXML is better than the former MS formats is unclear to me. Because they are calling it "open'? That's like MS "open-sauce", a fine blend of poor programming, deceit and plenty of money to corrupt the corruptible.

Dan,
perhaps we aren't getting pissy about the old closed formats because, if memory serves, NONE of them were ever put forth as INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS. They were merely the data output files of a set of proprietary programs, and were only guaranteed to work with the same version of that proprietary program that they were written with (and at times, even that compatibility was questionable). There was no guarantee that they would or should work with any non-MS software. However, as part of being a STANDARD, OOXML should work with any software for which the software producer cares to write import and export utilities, and the specifications of the OOXML standard detail the manner in which OOXML is to be used.
But at its heart, the OOXML debate is not about data file formats or standards. It is about money. Specifically, the money that Microsoft would lose by having their old, closed, proprietary formats excluded from large and lucrative government contracts. OOXML is Microsoft's half-hearted attempt at being "open"-enough that they can scream loudly when government bodies (ie - Massachusetts) declare MSOffice to be unfit for public use.

The answer is people don't want just another 'UNquestionably closed' format... It's good to see people don't forget so easy ;)

Why was no one every quite this pissy about MS's old formats: .doc, .xls, and .ppt. All these formats are ACTUALLY closed formats. OOXML may not be perfect, but it's better than the old closed ones. 

I just can't understand why everyone is all upset over these questionably open formats and ignoring the UNquestionably closed ones.

Oh well. Let's just keep poking the bear...