A nice post on making standards by Dave McAlister of Adobe: Good Standards. I posted on the same topic last April, and what I said there still stands:
Contrast that with the process by which Adobe is submitting PDF to ISO. We’ve bent over backwards to ensure that the submission is as clean as it can possibly be, and as a result the feedback we’ve gotten has been extremely positive. If Microsoft believes their own stuff is so great, they should follow our lead and make it into a standard the right way: by proving the value of their solution, responding to constructive criticism, and building a consensus.
