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

Re:Ahh...

[Hoppelainen]

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.

Interesting ...

[gerddie]

... 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))

More OOXML shenanigans

[RelliK]

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:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200708241 23112581

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200708151 25524759

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200707232 35113424

Re:Probably Stupid Question

[petermgreen]

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.

Re:Ahh...

[MontyApollo]

I fail to see how anyone other than MS would have anything to gain from pushing OOXML, unless they are getting kickbacks.

They were MS Gold certified companies. They make their living pushing MS products.

Even companies partnering with MS would benefit greatly if a more open standard, such as ODF, was being used into which they could integrate into more easily and actually do something useful with.

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.

The list

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Computer Sweden , the companies in question are:

• 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.

Re:Ahh...

[guruevi]

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.

6546 pages?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Google reply:

In developing standards, as in other engineering processes, it is a bad idea to reinvent the wheel. The OOXML standard document is 6546 pages long. The ODF standard, which achieves the same goal, is only 867 pages. The reason for this is that ODF references other existing ISO standards for such things as date specifications, math formula markup and many other needs of an office document format standard. OOXML invents its own versions of these existing standards, which is unnecessary and complicates the final standard. If ISO were to give OOXML with its 6546 pages the same level of review that other standards have seen, it would take 18 years (6576 days for 6546 pages) to achieve comparable levels of review to the existing ODF standard (871 days for 867 pages) which achieves the same purpose and is thus a good comparison. Considering that OOXML has only received about 5.5% of the review that comparable standards have undergone, reports about inconsistencies, contradictions and missing information are hardly surprising.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[jc42]

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.

Re:And we are surprised why?

[lixee]

We all know that M$ doesn't play fair in terms of open standards, and never will. Why are we surprised?

Who said anyone was surprised?

We are outraged.

Re:ODF vs OOXML FUD with spreadsheets

[roystgnr]

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.