Computerworld (US) have a great article on the whole OOXML standardization row.

This article makes great reading with the following useful points from Jan Van Den Beld.

• Any standard is going to have flaws in it.
  Certainly ODF will have flaws (the inability to represent the billions of historic documents acurately being one of them). Can you imaging the furore had Microsoft and Apple and the legions of Microsoft developers around the world waged war on ODF as it went through the process?
• A long standard isn't necessarily bad- Java was over 8000 pages when Sun submitted it to ECMA. IBM are still a member of ECMA and one is OBLIGED to ask why they didn't kick up such a stink around OOXML as it went theough the ECMA Technical Comittee?
• ECMA and ISO have fast tracked technically similar standards before- the example he gives are DVD formats.
  Multiple, similar standards, while "not a good result, are, because of patent wars, often an inevitable result," he said.
  Of course the war here is not around patents- but if you think that there is any hope of harmonizing OOXML and ODF then just look at the comments from Gary Edwards (he's the Editor of the original ODF standard). “The current memebership of the OASIS ODF TC is clearly and uequivocably on record as opposed to the interoperability the marketplace is screaming for.“