Panic erupted among the open standards advocates last month when Microsoft put in a request to the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) to join one of its 34 technical committees. The committee in question is V1 – Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface, the committee that controls the fate of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard.

The alarm was raised by Pamela Jones, author of the popular Groklaw blog. In a post on March 21, she wrote: “Do you remember when we learned about the ECMA process, how Microsoft was sending its XML there, and how ECMA has a fast track to the ISO? I wonder if maybe Microsoft is worried it`s still not fast enough to beat ODF, because the company has just joined the group [INCITS] that decides if ODF is ready to move forward in the ISO process.”

Her fear was that Microsoft had an ulterior motive for wanting to be part of the committee and panic ripped through the industry as the story was picked up by IT publications.