PDF Likely an ISO Standard

According to this news story from Ars Technica, it appears that the Adobe PDF format will likely be recognized as an international standard by the international ISO standards organization.
A lot of formats from commercial vendors have become de facto standards. Probably the classic case is the older Microsoft Office .doc (Word), .xls (Excel) and .ppt (Powerpoint) standards, which many non-Microsoft products can recorgnize and process.
What’s a little more interesting is that the Open Source movement has encouraged software vendors to make these standards “official”. It’s a good way to keep in business if you can get buy in.