ISO said Friday that the appeals made by Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela protesting the standardization of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) file format hadn’t gone anywhere – it was unclear whether any of them had any standing anyway – but since they “failed to garner sufficient support” from the ISO/IEC technical committees, as ISO put it – the standards body is going to go ahead and publish OOXML as an ISO/IEC International Standard, ISO/IEC DIS 29500 – or it will provided another, effective appeal isn’t registered.

ISO said the spec would be published in the next few weeks “on completion of final processing of the document, and subject to no further appeals against the decision.”

So then it’s still a race between publication and Microsoft’s many critics mustering a viable appeal.

According to ISO’s arcane rules Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela could apparently take their complaints to the Executive Councils of both ISO and IEC and drag the process out longer.

ISO acknowledged all the dust raised over the standardization process itself – and implicitly the alleged Microsoft irregularities – and said the experience would “provide important input” for improving its processes.

The European Commission, by the way, is investigating the allegations that Microsoft tilted the playing field as part of the agency’s renewed probe of the company for still more antitrust violations.