Microsoft Bought Sweden's ISO Vote on OOXML?

a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"

Comments

Corporate whores

[Stanistani]

Never has the old phrase been so accurate.

Re:Corporate whores

[Octopus]

ME STANDARDIZE YOU LONG TIME!

Re:Corporate whores

[TapeCutter]

Offtopic? - who payed for that trick?

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[peterprior]

Are their products that poor?

Yes ?

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[zeromorph]

:s/?/!/

fixed it for ya.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[dave420]

Because they don't have to. It's not about poor products, but why leave something to chance when you can seal the deal by splashing some cash around? I'm not defending them, it just makes a lot of sense.

The funniest thing of all

[TheSciBoy]

This is a quote from the SIS.SE home page:

Det är inte pengar som får världen att fungera
Vill du veta vad det är?

Translation in english: "It's not money that makes the world go around. Do you want to know what it is?"

Apparently the answer is: money

Re:Evil bastards

[hxnwix]

Truly, they are evil, and any person of conscience could not work there and retain their integrity. Sir, walk carefully, for you are treading on other people's livelihoods. I know a number of Microsoft employees, and they couldn't possibly be more offended by your suggestion that they lack the right stuff. At Microsoft, they all feel like they are finally important, like they are finally part of something bigger than themselves. At Microsoft, everybody gets to be an integral part of stealing money from donation boxes and candy from babies.
 
If that's not integrity, what is?

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[Anonymous Coward]

:s/\?\/!/

fixed it for you.

"Ready! Aim! ..."

[zooblethorpe]

I think the least we could do is shout "FIRE!"

...so long as MS is against the wall. Blindfolds or not, I don't care.

Reminds me of a joke...

[Spy der Mann]

This reminds me of a political joke I heard somewhere. I've adapted it to programming.

God was in a good mood and decided to give virtues to people. One day he decided to give all the programmers in the world three virtues:

They would be smart, well-intentioned, and work for Microsoft. But an angel told him: Hey, wait a minute, aren't they too many virtues?
"You're right", said God. "They'll have these virtues but a person can only have two of these virtues at the same time".

Since then, programmers in the world were divided in the three following groups:

Programmers who were smart and well-intentioned, couldn't work for Microsoft.
Programmers who were smart and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be well-intentioned.
Programmers who were well-intentioned and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be smart.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[Bossk-Office]

Help! You just modded a guy Insightful for asking whether Microsoft products are poor!

Re:PAYED/PAID

[jollyreaper]

'Nazi' should be capitalized. Just so you know. Not if they're midget fascists.