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But why choose a (effectively) proprietary format?

ISO/IEC 29500 is not a proprietary format.

It is for the .doc format and other Office firmat until Microsoft Office 2008 included and do not provide a standard for the the post-2008 Office format (ending with the `x` in the file extension), AFAIK.

You're mistaken, ISO 29500 and ECMA-376 are both (they're actually three somewhat different standards all in all, as I understand it) for "Office Open XML" (totally not intended to be confused with Open Office and Open Office XML), which is docx/pptx/xlsx etc.

ODT (OpenDocument) is also XML-in-a-ZIP and is also an ISO standard (older than Microsoft's, in fact).

I don't think the older variants (.doc, .xls etc.) are standardized, but iirc Microsoft did eventually release some documentation on them.

ISO is not free which is very cumbersome and why many ISO standards are not implemented correctly (like 8601). I consider ISO proprietary and bad for that reason.

And what's more, the docx ISO "standardization" was very controversial.

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