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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.'"

1 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Sore losers by tinkerghost · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Did they cheat somehow? No, They followed the rule required to vote - they payed the fees.

    Is there some reason that these companies should NOT have been allowed to vote?
    They failed to participate in any of the discussions leading up to the vote & in fact most have not partecipated previously in any discussions on any ISO related standards.

    Are any of them not legitimate companies? No? Then STFU and stop whining.

    You're right we should stop whining & petition ISO to change the rules on voting to block this kind of ballot stuffing. I doubt very much that any of these companies have seen the document spec let alone read & understand it.

    This is actually one of the fairer subversions of the process - in Portugol they denied IBM & SUN access claiming the room was too full, then allowed MS partners to enter & vote. In another place, the chairman - an employee of an MS partner announced the voting procedure as

    • Consensus to approve - vote to approve
    • majority approve - vote to approve
    • no majority - vot to approve
    • majority to dis-approve - vote to approve with comments
    • consensus to dis-approve - abstain

    Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.