V1, the subcommittee advising the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) on formats, has failed by a tantalizing two votes to endorse Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format, already standardized by ECMA, as fit for ISO standardardization even though Microsoft reportedly packed V1 with its friends in anticipation of the vote last week. Despite the fact that V1 had only seven voting members a few months ago and 26 last Friday, the 13th, as it happens, no two-thirds consensus was reached and now INCITS' executive board is going to have to sort through the stack of V1's technical comments and come up with an American position through a 30-day letter ballot. There could also be a reconsideration ballot after that.