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

Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[QuietLagoon]

First the movie studios and HD-DVD, and now standards committees are being purchased.

Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[tgcid]

Buying the outcome is more cost-effective.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

[Hijacked Public]

Why should they?

Poor products or not it looks like they invested $50k to cement their format as a standard. Considering they stand to make billions from that, it was a wise investment. It is the people who designed a system that could so easily be bought who should be ashamed, if that wasn't their intended outcome in the first place. A company can't deny its nature.

And we are surprised why?

[CodeShark]

Repeat after me "money buys influence money buys influence money busy influence...."

Too bad the truth gets lost when the money starts talking. *sigh*

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

Ahh...

[Zatchmort]

...good old-fashioned democracy at work. Seriously, though, what kind of organization are they running, here? Any company, from anywhere, can suddenly be a member just by paying 2500-- a nominal fee, for many large companies. That seems like asking for trouble to me.

Re:Ahh...

[PinkyDead]

Seriously, though, what kind of organization are they running I think this is the nub of the problem. ISO standards are used all around the world to protect people - and they're certainly used for far more important things than document formats.

But in the case of car manufacturers or construction engineers or whoever else, the ISO protects the companies by providing highly quality standard by which to work. If Ford etc follow the standards for manufacturing their cars yet one of them still crashes or explodes or whatever, then Ford is covered (somewhat) by its adherence to the standards.

This organization works very well in the non-software model, as Ford don't want cars blowing up any more than the ISO does.

Thing is, throw Microsoft in there. They couldn't give a crap whether documents are unreadable in the future, no one is going to sue them anyway. So they can safely work against the principal of quality standards with no impunity.

Now if they could be sued every time they screwed up your document - then there'd be a different story here.

Re:Ahh...

[perrin]

I fail to see how anyone other than MS would have anything to gain from pushing OOXML, unless they are getting kickbacks. 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. This all sounds like a corruption of the standards organization unlike anything I have ever heard of previously. If this does not become anti-trust material a few years down the road, at least in the EU and Japan, I would very surprised.

Who paid?

[LordEd]

One would think that SIS would not accept new companies to participate in the vote since they haven't been part of the earlier discussions and meetings. But according to SIS they didn't see any problem that new companies wanted to take part in this vote without prior notice. So what happened here is that Microsoft gather together a bunch of loyal partners that would vote yes to their standard without any questions.

Did Microsoft pay their fee? If yes, then they stuffed the box. If not, then 23 companies with a common interest with Microsoft joined an organization to vote for something in their own interests.

But... didn't they want it like that?

[Tipa]

Step 1 - allow votes to be bought.
Step 2 - take money from companies who wish to buy votes.
Step 3 - Profit!
Step 3a - Complain about the unfairness of it all, all the way to the bank.

How to defend against this

[mcrbids]

It's a tactic that's unfortunately too common, but easily defended against, with either of these options:

A) Don't let new members vote for any issues until they've been members for a certain period of time, or

B) Don't let new members vote on any issue that had already been opened for debate (or perhaps officially proposed) prior to their joining.

It's as simple as that.

Re:How to defend against this

[garcia]

It's a tactic that's unfortunately too common, but easily defended against, with either of these options:

A) Don't let new members vote for any issues until they've been members for a certain period of time

It's an issue that we dealt with before even approving bylaws for our organization. Someone in the proposed membership mentioned that they wanted protection against this and we decided to require 6 months in the org before allowing voting membership (or 7 days following the Spring Meeting). This was eventually lowered to 3 months by the membership by vote.

We don't charge dues so anyone could have walked into a meeting and maliciously taken it over with no intentions on doing anything but spend the few dollars we have.

The only reason an organization like this could allow that is because they wanted the money for their coffers and couldn't care less about the actual "standards" being approved.

Re:How to defend against this

[stonecypher]

Yeah, because nobody has ever thought of planting people ahead of time, and there isn't already a cadre of Microsoft employees, and indeed from every other major computing organization, on every major standards body. All that means is that Microsoft submarines half a dozen people onto any committee they want to work on for some up-front amount of time. It's the Price Is Right Conundrum: any amount of time you put up there on the board, Microsoft will add one dollar - pardon, day - and bid there. Why do you think Netscape, a tiny company, had so many people on the various W3 standards? Why do you think Opera does today? It's the exact same thing, and this is just how these boards work. There's no particular way around it; you can't set time limits, price limits, count of people from a company, because they're all trivially easily gamed.

Any time you make a plutocracy, it will be commercially exploited. If they want to be immune to this crap, they need to move to a meritocracy or an election. Next time you have a solution, put your black hat on and see if you can break it in under 15 seconds of honest thought. (You could have, this time, several different ways.)

Re:Sore losers

[erroneus]

There's a huge difference between "legal" and "right." I'd really like you to make an argument that this was a right and correct tactic for Microsoft to use. What if, for the sake of argument, people could buy their way into a jury in criminal prosecution? I think we'd see right away what would happen. Every person with an agenda would routinely buy his chance to vote to "hang'm high!"

In this case, it's a chance to vote on an international standard -- one that many governments are obliged to allow, support or follow. This is, in effect, a chance to "buy" your way into government policy.

But there are certainly, in my opinion, two problems here:

1. That the ability to vote has such low entry requirements and that no amount of knowledge or understanding seems to have any bearing on whether or not someone is qualified to vote. (yes, I realize you could make the same argument for local elections, and I do.)
2. That Microsoft has no shame in deploying such an obvious, self-serving tactic of essentially buying their way into being elected as an international standard. It may be 'legal' but it's unethical and definitely not right.

Re:Sore losers

[mastropiero]

I'm sorry to break this to you, but ISO approval of standards is supposed to be governed by TECHNICAL considerations. By this logic, a vote on whether OOXML is approved by fasttrack should be based on the TECHNICAL merits of the proposal, not on how popular Micorosft Corp. is.

Sadly, the fact that these people joined the discussion only *after* the debate on those technical merits was over only shows that this process has become nothing more than a high-school president election in a bad B-movie.

Re:Sore losers

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

You are complaining about a process that subverts ... well, what you want the outcome to be. But this democratic process subverts something else: market forces.

You do realize monopolies are restrained by law because they subvert the free market forces, right? For example, if you have a monopoly in one area you can use it to extract more money from a market while expending less investment and giving less to consumers, thus accumulating piles of money you can use to say, pay other companies to act on you behalf in meetings. Or pressure other companies to act on you behalf under threat of financially ruining them by cutting them out of markets that interact with the one(s) controlled by your monopoly.

This particular round of misdeeds is just one more symptom of the main problem, MS is an abusive monopoly with so much money they've been able to buy the politicians who run the courts and are supposed to enforce the law.

Re:Sore losers

[NickFortune]

STFU and stop whining.

Stop whining? Certainly. STFU? I don't think so.

There's more to this issue than "mummy mummy microsoft did a bad thing and it's not faaaaaair!". The question we should be asking is "Is this the sort of behaviour we really want to encourge?"

Do we really want an industry where standards are sold to the highest bidder without any scrutiny as to fitness for their supposed purpose. If so, the ISO committees may as well pack their bags and go home now, because we are headed for a world where no one will pay any attention at all to their so called "standards".

I think that merits some discussion. Not because Microsoft did a Bad Thing so much, but because the standards process served a useful purpose. Microsoft may well be willing to burn this process to the ground in order to protect their file formats. I think the least we could do is shout "FIRE!"

Re:What part of "capitalism" don't you understand?

[Dystopian Rebel]

Here are the parts of Capitalism that I don't understand:
- unsafe products
- unhealthy products
- unsustainable processes
- suppression of the truth about unsafe products
- exploitation of the poor and the uninformed
- outsourcing (abandonment of the community)
- tax evasion
- consumerism
- competition that puts profits before people
- profitable relationship with war

But then if you accept the premise that People Don't Matter, all the above makes perfect sense.

They violated ethical standards.

[twitter]

An organization that has no ethics is worthless.

Rules are always more a mater of their spirit than their letter. The protest of other members is real and well founded. It's pretty obvious that M$ played the organizations rules to get a result that is against everything the organization stands for. If the organization does not investigate and punish this kind of blatant abuse, the organization will lose all community respect.

A reasonable US Government would investigate M$ for corrupt foreign practices.

What can each of us do to stop OOXML in the ISO?

[Optic7]

I would like to know. Is there anything we can do? Write to the ISO? Anything? Or can we just sit and watch while this happens?

ODF vs OOXML FUD with spreadsheets

[fritsd]

ODF leaves an astonishing amount as implementation-defined, including most of spreadsheets.

Reference?

Microsoft could easily make Office read and write ODF 100% following the standard, and have horrible interoperability with OpenOffice, simply by not recognize OpenOffice's non-standard elements.

Microsoft is a long-term member of OASIS. They were invited to join the OpenDocument TC. They were even urged to do it by the European Commission. They declined. If, as you say, it would have been easy for them to wiggle their "embrace extend extinguish" technique into the cracks between ODF and the actual file format of OpenOffice, then WHY DIDN'T THEY DO THAT?

And, also, why did they refuse to extend ODF to incorporate those precious (formalized / parameterized) AutoSpaceLikeWord95 features, which would have been a PITA for their competition to implement? Now they are actually whining that ODF isn't "feature-complete" enough for them so they had to invent OOXML.

I think any comment that ODF would be deficient as the default file format for Microsoft Office is FUD until you can provide examples.

There are lots of detailed examples that OOXML is crap (see the commentary of those national bureaus that weren't silenced or corrupted), the ODF spec is approx 10% as many pages as OOXML, surely you can come up with *some* examples where it is deficient? Otherwise all you do is spreading Microsoft's FUD.

You mentioned spreadsheets: please enlighten us with your comments. Is it about par. 8.1.3 p. 189,

Formulas allow calculations to be performed within table cells. Every formula should begin with a namespace prefix specifying the syntax and semantics used within the formula.

?

Agreed, that's under-specified and would benefit from a future clarification, such as OpenFormula.

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).

THAT is what those companies and national bureaux voted for, to make that an international standard. They should be ashamed.

Re:Sore losers

[Tom]

Did they cheat somehow? No, They followed the rule required to vote - they payed the fees. Your definition of "cheating" needs updating.

If I find a bug in WoW that allows me to get a million gold everytime I click a specific key combo, you, Blizzard and every WoW player would call it cheating, even though the "rules" of the game include that bug at that point.

Cheating is not breaking the rules. Cheating is breaking the spirit of the rules, whether or not you literaly break them. In fact, most cheating happens by lawyer-weaseling your way through the loopholes in the rules. Most board game rules do not explicitly forbid you to look at the cards stacked face-down on the board, but everyone would agree that doing so is cheating.

And that's exactly what happened here.