Microsoft has lost a key vote in its quest to develop an alternative to the Open Document Format standard, backed by the open-source community.

The executive committee of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) fell one vote shy of the nine required to approve Microsoft's Open XML standard. It voted 8 to 7 in favor of approval with one abstention, the group announced Thursday.

The vote is a setback in a long-running battle between Microsoft and those who are seeking to dislodge Microsoft's monopoly hold on the desktop with internationally approved standards for office documents. The battle has pitted Microsoft against open-source backers like Sun and IBM, whose rival ODF (Open Document Format for XML) has gained some support among government users.

Open XML is the default file format used by Microsoft's Office 2007.

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The U.S. delegate organization to the powerful ISO standards body is now almost sure to vote against approving Microsoft Corp.'s Office Open XML document format as an open standard this year.

That could sway other member nations of the JTC-1 technical committee in the International Organization of Standardization to vote against Open XML's approval by the Sept. 2nd deadline.

But at least one insider says that changes to Open XML to which Microsoft has already agreed could help the technology win approval in a revote in September 2008.

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