Résumé
The present coexistence of two rival institutional standards (ODF and OOXML) on electronic documents constitutes an intriguing situation. It constitutes a contest of economic standardization theory concerning dominant design and, it also, contradicts the institutional process to lead the stakeholders to converge to a unique reference for the market. We explore the process that entailed this situation. We particularly analyze the strategic movements between competition and cooperation and test the pertinence of the coopetition concept to express the complex nature of relationships between competitors. Our analysis of the mail exchanges in the technical committee of the French Standard Setting Organization (AFNOR) allows us to observe the actor's perception with an exploratory approach of a case analysis. We try to determine if the war between ODF and OOXML electronic documents formats finally corresponds to coopetition or only reveals pure competition.