According to this, the ISO are now calling a "standard" the Microsoft Office format (which is cynically called "Office Open XML"). I won't elaborate on the reasons why this thing is the opposite of what a standard should be, as this is clear to anybody not influenced by Microsoft.

What is interesting is that TeX, LaTeX, OGG/Vorbis, OGG/Theora, Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, OCaml, are not standardized by any organization. Yet everybody knows that they are "self-standardized" by the free availability of extensive documentation and/or a by free-as-in-freedom unobfuscated reference implementation.

This shows that standardization organizations are no longer relevant in the software field. What really matters is free full documentation, free full implementation source code, and of course the absence of any patent risk. In other words, coming back to the fundamentals of what a standards is, what matters is evidence that any independent third-party can create and distribute a fully-conforming implementation. When this is the case, nobody needs an organization to certify that it is a standard.

That the ISO just proved itself open to the influence of special interests, is the consequence, not the cause, of its present irrelevance (again, in the software field). Since it is not needed anymore, nobody knows exactly what its mission is, what role it should play. Which allowed Microsoft to redefine that to its own advantage.

I think that the best move the ISO could now make is to acknowledge the limits of its own domain of application, which is the traditional industry, and to acknowledge that the software area is no longer such a traditional industry. In other words, ISO (and other standards organizations) should leave the whole software area, where they are not needed anymore.

Thinking further about this, here is perhaps the deep reason why in the end, software is beyond the field of application of standards organizations. This reason is that software is actually "just" mathematics. That was not obvious in the first decades of the computer industry, but it is becoming a concrete reality. Publishing the source code of a program is the equivalent of publishing the proof of a theorem. This is why the free software movement is changing the rules regarding standardization of software. In mathematics, once the proof of a theorem is published, there is no need for any authority to certify that the theorem is true. Everybody can independently look at the proof and realize that it is. And everybody can use the theorem without consulting its author. Likewise, once a free format specification is published with a free software implementation, there is no need for any authority (i.e. any standards organization) to certify that it can be used independently by any third-party (i.e. that it can be considered a standard). Thus, in the 21st century, a "standard" is just anything that has a full, free software implementation.