  Already in the past, hadronic tau decays have served as an interesting source
to obtain information on the parameters of the Standard Model, like the strong
coupling alpha_s or the strange quark mass. Below it will be shown that the
approach to obtain the strange mass from the hadronic tau-decay width can be
turned into a determination of the CKM matrix element V_us, once the strange
mass is used as an input from other sources. At present, we obtain V_us =
0.2179 +- 0.0045, where the error is completely dominated by the experimental
uncertainty, and can be improved through an improved measurement of the
hadronic tau-decay rate into strange particles R_tau,S.
