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Microsoft Bought Sweden's ISO Vote on OOXML?

Posted by Zonk on from the and-here-i-am-buying-stuff-like-food dept.

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.'"

3 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ahh... by Hoppelainen · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Interesting ... by gerddie · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... 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))

  3. Re:Ahh... by MontyApollo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.