An objection sample is that of Prof SK Gupta of IIT Delhi at a committee meeting in June 13, 2007.

"I am strongly of the view that voting for OOXML by BIS at ISO will increase the digital divide in India and will harm the domestic industry and economy. After discussions with my colleagues, I do not find any reason why a separate document standards of OOXML needs to be adopted when a fully functional ODF standard already exists and has Indian implementations also. The stated objective of OOXML is to support Microsoft Office," Professor Gupta said.

He further added, "Further, OOXML has only one known implementation. There is no need to make a standard out of a format that has only one known implementation. OOXML will clearly prevent Indian software firms from coming out with their own office productivity solution that is so critical for reducing the digital divide. Given the size of the OOXML documentation, it is also not practically implementable. Therefore my opinion is that BIS must vote against OOXML at ISO."

But Microsoft officials say they do not see that way. They say they are awaiting the meeting of the ISO committee on September 4th. Vijay Kapoor, National Technology officer, Microsoft: "ISO has not rejected the OOXML standard. They cannot. When they vote "yes" they have given their comments, even if they say no to the standard they have to give their objections." The process of accepting standards is not a judgment by the BIS its one of consensus building. And even though they have said no and they have given their reason why and if Microsoft is able to address these objections, ISO will ask them to convert it into a "yes", he says.

The overall sentiment seems to be against approving OOXML as a standard. Part of the reason that so many committee members are against Microsoft is because of the attitude of the company. As a monopoly player Microsoft never much cared about the BIS and its recommendations. It ignored several requests by the committee to submit its comments to their technical queries, according to committee members who did not wish to be quoted.

Microsoft officials, commenting about their participation in the committee and responding to its demands say, "There were so many objections and they cannot be responded to immediately, we needed time and approval from our global offices to respond to it."

Which standard do you want to vote for?