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Open Standards Initiative Fails in Massachusetts

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the after-much-ado dept.

walterbyrd writes "Massachusetts has decided to use Microsoft's Open-XML standard. This decison: 'stands in sharp contrast to the positions taken by predecessor CIOs Peter Quinn and Louis Gutierrez, backed by then governor (and now-presidential hopeful) Mitt Romney. Both Quinn and Gutierrez insisted on including only "open standards" in the ETRM, and withstood significant pressure from Microsoft to give ground and accept OOXML...'"

2 of 236 comments (clear)

  1. Well, it took time... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I guess the good news is how long it took Microsoft to kill it. They are not as good as they used to be with the FUD.

  2. Report from Switzerland (Meeting of SNV/UK14) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Just yesterday I was sitting in the relevant meeting of SNV/UK14 (http://www.snv.ch/), that decides how Switzerland will vote. The chairman (Hans-Rudolf Thomann) explained the following rules:
    - we are here to create standards, not to reject them
    - if we reach consensus (>=75%) to vote for Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft
    - if we only reach a majority (>=50%) to vote for Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft
    - if we reach a majority to vote against Microsoft, we will vote for Microsoft
    - if we reach consensus to vote against Microsoft, we will abstain

    The present spin doctors of Microsoft and ECMA managed to convince Mr. Thomann to reject every serious technical and general concern we had regarding OOMXL by pointing to compatibility reasons. At the end we had a majority _against_ Microsoft but which (giving the unfair rules) results in a Swiss vote _for_ Microsoft. Mr. Thomann was fretting and fuming at the end of the meeting how it can be that successful international companies (we had representatives from IBM, Google, ...) vote against the best interest of their customers and theirself!

    Yes, this is how the democratic system at SNV / ISO works. After the meeting I could not eat as much as I wanted to puke...

    Posted as AC for obvious reasons