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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.'"
Any Swedish company can become a member of SIS buy paying somewhere around $300-$500 per year. To be allowed to vote in this particular issue an extra 15 000 Sek ($2500) was needed. So yeah, it is open for anyone with cash (but they had to be members of SIS since before.
... in Germany, Deutsche Telekom and Google would have voted "no". However, both were not allowed to vote because they came in late. And another guy left the voting session early, but his "yes" was counted although before it was said that only votes count that were given in presence. (according to Heise (german))
They played by the rules of the ISO. The 'normal way things are supposed to work' are apparently not what they had in mind, if they allow anyone to join at any time and vote at short notice. I agree, its dumb, but they followed the rules to a tee.
Partial translation of FFII Sweden press release:l
http://ffii.se/pr/2007-08-27-se-ooxml-vote-en.htm
I'm surprised it has not been covered on slashdot, but similar things have occured in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, Australia, etc. Microsoft is determined to push its proprietary "open" format through by any means neccessary:
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http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070824
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070815
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070723
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
many government departments and even entire governments arround the world are threatening to require arhived documents to be in standard formats. MS is trying to do an end run arround theese requirements by getting standards bodies to approve a fake standard they have written. Unfortunately it seems that they are having quite some sucess in doing so thanks to thier use of various dirty tactics.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
> Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
t ive-by-design.html
Yes.
http://www.arstdesign.com/articles/OOXML-is-defec
They were MS Gold certified companies. They make their living pushing MS products.
I doubt they see it that way. The more people sticking with MS, the more cache "MS Gold certified partner" has. OOXML will be more easy to integrate if everything is already MS.
:wq
stored it for ya
- Camako Data AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Connecta AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Cornerstone Sweden AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Cybernetics (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Emric AB
- Exor AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- Fishbone Systems AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Formpipe Software (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- FS System AB
- Google
- HP (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- IBizkit AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- IDE Nätverkskonsulterna (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- IT-Vision AB
- Illuminet
- Know IT (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Modul1 (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Nordic Station AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- ReadSoft AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- Sogeti (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Solid Park AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- SourceTech AB
- Strand Interconnect AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- TietoEnator (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
If you work for any of these companies, please contact management and ask them to explain themselves.The first steps to countering these kinds of shennanigans is bringing them to light. Change the rules? Maybe. But definitely make sure everyone understands what is going on first. Let's call a spade a spade.
Microsoft will likely call it as some kind of standards mandate; justification for their work. Denial of their critics. We can sit back and accept that. Or we can let everyone know how Microsoft's interests subverted the process and, perhaps, not everything Microsoft claims is as it seems.
Meanwhile, those who own this process can review how a single interest subverted it and decide if the system is serving their interests or not. I like to think the ISO process is about technical review and standardization for the general good of the industry those they serve. But maybe it's not.
4 parties, including IBM left without a vote.
So I think these parties would have voted no so the result would have been 5-10-3.
Looks much better.
What power has law where only money rules.
Not exactly.
Supporters of open standards wish for Microsoft to adhere to a true standard, one that is well-documented, easily implemented, and available for all. Currently, ODF does all that.
OOXML, on the other hand, is obtuse, hard to implement (even for Microsoft), leaves much unspecified, and is Microsoft-centric, rather than document-centric.
The problem is actually with Microsoft. They have rigged the system to favor their platform above all others, rather than risk losing their stranglehold on your documents. If Microsoft were to support ODF, and participate in the OASIS working group once again, their office suite would have to compete entirely on merit. A person or company could use the office suite of their choice, and exchange documents with no difficulty.
The place to make money is in the friction. The more friction there is-- that is, the more painful *not* using your product or service is-- the more money you can charge. Microsoft is great at increasing friction by manipulating the market.
Microsoft is ensuring they are able to keep up the friction.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Steal what you can, "retired" Mr. Gates.
You fail to see the point in here. Microsoft has become a living entity. It's not Gates, nor Ballmer. It's Microsoft itself, along with its shareholders and leaders. Its corporate structure has been adapted to become a monopoly, and to step on everything to fulfill its goals. Anyone disagreeing with it is rejected, and seen as a pathogen agent to keep the system running.
Microsoft has become a cancer for the free world, and it must die.
Having worked for MS Gold partners, MS Gold partners are just extensions of Microsoft itself basically. They push Microsoft products and are not allowed to promote alternative products.
...).
I worked for a hosting company that was a MS Gold partner but our 'free' hosting and static domain names was on Apache/Linux for the 'free' reason and we had to proxy the requests through a bunch of IIS boxes or reroute certain ICMP traffic on the firewall so it would come up as IIS/ASP.NET/Windows 2003 with NetCraft. And then the sales junkie finally got the report that more than 50% of their machines were Windows.
The sales were not allowed to sell Linux or Mac unless specifically asked and persisted on by the customer and then we had to support Apache/PHP/MySQL on Windows (that was back in 2002), then on tradeshows we had to say 70% of our machines were running Windows, that metric we got only because we didn't include our internal Linux service machines (you know Nagios, e-mail, spamfilters, Snort, firewalls,
By the way: we hosted parts of MSN (Belgium) and the dumbest thing they did: buy a cheap Shared Hosting package for MSN advertisements (which were going to display nationwide) and they HARD CODED the shared package URL (msn.server.hostingcompany.com) in MSN Messenger, we had to redirect our nameservers for that URL to a separate server.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The ODF supporters are trying to block OOXML from becoming a standard ONLY because they've lobbied governments into passing open standards laws that will REQUIRE those governments to use their format if OOXML fails. They don't give a damn if it's the best format or not; they want a monopoly enforced by law.
Nonsense. The ODF supporters want an open format, so that there is no more microsoft lock-in in the office applications market. Some of these are indeed supporting it for commercial reasons (sun and google), but most of the ODF supporters are in it for transparency in government.
The case against OOXML on technical grounds has been made. The format is not open. See this link if you want more info: http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Yeah, mostly, but that's irrelevant. They do have a few good products, but that's also irrelevant to sales.
Microsoft's entire history, and IBM's for the previous decodes, demonstrates quite well that sales in any computer-related field are determined almost entirely by marketing budget. Quality is nice, but it doesn't add materially to sales, so if you have the marketing clout, there's no financial reason to also invest heavily in quality.
Sorry to break the news to you. The best product doesn't win. The best-marketed product wins.
There's no (financial) reason that MS should care whether OOXML is good or bad. Their primary concern is that people use it, and this only requires that it be minimally usable. Investing what is for them a small amount to get their encoding declared a "standard" is just a (standard;-) marketing approach, and it would be puzzling if they didn't do it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
We are outraged.
Res publica non dominetur
I assume that HP voted YES because they voted YES in the recent US vote that took place on 08/24/2007, the results of which were YES 12, NO 3, ABSTAIN 1, which was enough to approve OOXML.
/. carried a story trumpeting the previous "NO" vote, but hasn't done a story on the more recent YES vote.
You can see how each party voted here:
US OOXML VOTE 08/24/2007
Notable YES votes include MS, HP, APPLE, INTEL, SONY.
Notable NO votes were IBM.
It's amusing that slashdot carried hugh headlines for the NO vote, but hasn't covered the YES vote at all (unless I just missed it).
BTW, the US YES vote is a reversal of the 08/10/2007 US vote that was YES 8, NO 7, ABSTAIN 1, which was not enough for approval (which led to premature celebration by IBM's allies):
US OOXML VOTE 08/10/2007
You can check the two links to see which parties flipped from NO to YES. The most notable is the DoD.
It's amusing that
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
When I was a member of the ANSI C and C++ standards committees the rule was that you had to have attended two of the last three meetings to be able to vote. But that was ANSI, NOT the Swedish Standards Institute which will have its own rules that apparently (and unsurprisingly) are not the same as ANSI. Its position is then relayed to the ISO/IEC process and is then subject to the rules of procedure that apply there. Each national body is free to make up its own rules as long as it's happy to live by the outcome.
But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).
I didn't entirely believe this, and anyone else who didn't should go here like I did: ECMA Standard Office Open XML Formats. Although the writing style is slightly less retarded than in fritsd's paraphrased version, the writing content isn't. It turns out that the 1900-based dating is screwed up "for legacy reasons" (in an unstandardized format that didn't exist in any previous versions??) As the spec states,
"A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29 has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1."
I'd like to read further to try to understand why they're expressing integers as "1.0000000..." instead of "1.0" or even "1", but I'm starting to fear that the Stupid might be contagious.
That would mean Microsoft would be able to silently buy Portugal's vote, since they were able to buy the TC *before* it was formed by privately gathering puppets that would support their position, and who proposed to become "founding" members.
Instead I was able to join in and bring transparency to the meeting, even though the NB's representativy unilaterally decided to give less than 48h before refusing new members, as it saw that Microsoft's control would be wrestled out.
They don't give that excuse, of course, they mask it by room space (it could handle more and they chose not to use an auditorium) and representativity (just count the Microsoft Business Partners, or people with strong ties to Microsoft: 13 against 7).
:s/\?/!/ fixed it for you
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Do you know what a "non sequitur" is? It is when you make a statement like "False" in response to my claim that monopolies undermine the free market, and then you follow that statement with more statements that in no way back up your argument.
Firstly you get the types of monopolies wrong. There are natural monopolies which result from natural phenomenon, such as geography and there are monopolies imposes by unnatural forces such as a law, a lock-in technology, or via bundling. Secondly, any monopoly can be abused to undermine a free market. Because of natural monopolies it is not illegal to obtain a monopoly in a market, merely to abuse it by undermining a second market using your first monopoly.
Lets look at an extreme example of a natural monopoly for the sake of clarity. Suppose a meteor falls to earth with strange properties we cannot duplicate and that meteor is owned by an individual whose property it landed on. Now suppose, by drinking water that has been mixed with a small amount of this meteor you could extend your life to double or triple its normal span. The man being the only source for this substance, has a natural monopoly which is perfectly legal and while it does not conform to normal free market behavior, does not undermine any market. The problem is when that monopoly is abused to affect other markets. Suppose, for example, The man refused to sell the magical water outright, but instead agreed to sell only an expensive lifestyle package including a mansion, 4 cars, 3 pets, a wardrobe of clothing, a small jet plane, and a yacht. Well since everyone who wants said water has to buy all of these things as well, the markets for these other things is undermined. Many sellers of luxury yachts might go out of business since everyone who can afford a yacht already has one from our monopolist. It does not matter if the yachts sold by our monopolist are somewhat inferior or even if they cost 10 times the price of a similar yacht. Because it is bundled it has broken the free market.
Any monopoly can be used to undermine other markets via tying including bundling, thus monopolies are restrained by the law from undermining other markets. Microsoft is the example of the day because they not only have several monopolies but are constantly abusing those monopolies to undermine more and more markets in blatant defiance of the law. Their entire business plan is built around breaking antitrust law for profit, then tying things up in court as long as possible, paying of politicians, and paying off the lawsuits from the small number of victims who have enough money to get their claims through the courts.
Thanks for the link, by the way, but I've already read Greenspan's commentary as well as more about monopolies than most people who are not economics majors. I understand them just fine, you simply failed to understand either what I was saying, or how it applied.