Governments mandate ISO standards are to be used for documents so that 
they won't be locked into using a single supplier for their software.

MS forces their under specified format through ISO.

Governments say "OOXML is an ISO standard, lets use it."

Because the "specification" of the standard is incomplete MS is the only 
body which can implement it.

End result - government departments are still locked into using MS office.

As for the "do this like word97", the correct way to handle this would 
have been to include sufficient algorithms in the specification to allow 
a translator to convert old word documents into the new format.

From what I've been reading it seems that MS office won't actually be 
compliant with the ISO version of OOXML anyway so governments should 
refuse to buy it.

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