It's an "international standard" via both ECMA and the ISO/IEC JTC1. Although ISO in particular seems very pleased that JTC1 exists, this is a terrible way to do technical work, basically the idea is that countries get to agree the world's standards using a democratic process.
But why would countries be the right entities to do this work? They aren't, but there are a conveniently small number of them internationally and there were already bodies to represent them. Specifically they send representatives from their own national standards bodies to the relevant JTC1 sub-sub-committees. Yes that means Taiwan isn't represented.
For situations where there's just a matter of agreeing a few narrow specifics, such as the A-series paper standards, it doesn't really matter how it's done. For a huge problem like "Standardize Word processor application data" it's completely impractical and the results are all you'd expect. Microsoft basically leaned on national representatives from smaller countries to push their pointless vanity standard through both ECMA and subsequently JTC1.
After all that, it's basically futile because of course Microsoft can't magically make their "Office" suite and particularly Word behave in a documented internationally standard way, they don't even know how to describe much of the behaviour except "You know, that's how Word does it". And so, the "Office Open XML" standard has long sections where there's a magic escape hatch for "legacy" documents, which Word uses extensively, and it will always do that.
"Standard" except that yeah, all this non-standard stuff is critical and will be used forever. Futile.
But why would countries be the right entities to do this work? They aren't, but there are a conveniently small number of them internationally and there were already bodies to represent them. Specifically they send representatives from their own national standards bodies to the relevant JTC1 sub-sub-committees. Yes that means Taiwan isn't represented.
For situations where there's just a matter of agreeing a few narrow specifics, such as the A-series paper standards, it doesn't really matter how it's done. For a huge problem like "Standardize Word processor application data" it's completely impractical and the results are all you'd expect. Microsoft basically leaned on national representatives from smaller countries to push their pointless vanity standard through both ECMA and subsequently JTC1.
After all that, it's basically futile because of course Microsoft can't magically make their "Office" suite and particularly Word behave in a documented internationally standard way, they don't even know how to describe much of the behaviour except "You know, that's how Word does it". And so, the "Office Open XML" standard has long sections where there's a magic escape hatch for "legacy" documents, which Word uses extensively, and it will always do that.
"Standard" except that yeah, all this non-standard stuff is critical and will be used forever. Futile.