OOXML is a standard (a requirement for many administrations), which was
accepted in a fast-track process thanks to bought votes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML
It makes little technical sense: it is huge (~7200 pages nowadays, vs. ~1000
pages for ODF) because it standardized all the weird things (including bugs!)
present in the Microsoft Office suite. It contains elements such as
"autoSpaceLikeWord95", "footnoteLayoutLikeWW8", "lineWrapLikeWord6",
"shapeLayoutLikeWW8", "truncateFontHeightsLikeWP6", "uiCompat97To2003",
"useWord2002TableStyleRules", "useWord97LineBreakRules", etc.:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML_file_formats#Compatibility_settings
It was the first (and only?) time ISO was co-opted to accept a useless (ODF
was already an international standard) and technically inferior format, which
even contradicts with other ISO standards (e.g., to specify dates, colors,
etc.). OOXML allows to embed binary blobs, which is completely absurd for
what is supposed a standard. Even two years after OOXML become a standard,
no office suite (not even Microsoft Office 2010) was strictly implementing
it. Normally, the ISO committee insist on a reference implementation.
In the end, OOXML is not vendor-neutral. It is designed so that only
Microsoft Office could properly read/write DOCX and the likes. Not really a
standard...
