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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.'"
This feeling was driving me crazy. I HAD to have me a piece of ass soon, or I was simply gonna explode! I just couldn't keep out the thoughts of some young girl's pointed, jiggling tits slipping between my lips while my dick plowed between her moist slit.
My imagination, summer bikinis, and dad's PENTHOUSEs helped me to fill out my favorite fantasies of what the girls in my classes looked like naked. Those vivid images of beautiful, naked young girls coming into my room looking at my dick with lust, or my plopping them down on a desk right there in school and fucking our brains out seemed to dominate my every waking moment. Hell, even my nights were filled with wet dreams of these nubile young girls offering their naked bodies to me on sight!
The truth was I had never even seen a live naked girl since I was about seven-years-old playing doctor with a neigbor girl. Even then I didn't know what it was all about, just that my little dick got hard when I touched her bare pussy and that it felt REAL GOOD when she touched my hard dick. 'If only I new then what I know now,' I thought. Furthermore, I was much too shy to even approach a girl my age to ask for a date, much less to ask for a piece of ass or a blowjob.
I was sitting under a tree fretting about all of this one summer day, when I was startled by the voice of a young neighbor girl who had walked up behind me.
"What are you doing out here all by yourself?"
Pauline was a typical eleven-year-old, her body just beginning to show the first signs of maturing into an hourglass shape, but she still was flat-chested. Her personality had definitely not matured, and I even cosidered her to be quite a brat.
"Nothing much, just moping around," I told her.
"What's wrong?" she asked in a soft tone, touching my knee as she sat down beside me on the ground, her small skirt riding up her smooth legs.
I had never looked at her in a sexual way before, but the combination of my frustration and her uncharacteristic soft-spoken manner caused me to take a second look at her. She was actually a very pretty young girl, with long dark brown hair that flowed down onto her flat, preteen chest. Her innocent dark brown eyes looked deeply into mine as she pondered my troubles, and I began to get an idea on how I might exploit this budding motherly instinct of hers.
"Well......, it's just that a lot of the other guys my age have dated girls already," I began, "some of them have even had sex."
I paused to check her reaction. She was still sitting there looking at me intently, her knees pulled up near her chest and her arms draped around them casually leaving her skirt to gape open under her legs. I was sure that anyone passing by would be able to see her panties, but she didn't seem to be aware of her immodest pose.
"I'm just too shy to ask anyone out, though. I guess I'll never have the guts to either."
She sat there silently, bending her head down and resting her chin on her knees. She seemed to be in thought as she began to stare blankly at the ground in front of her, possibly wondering about her own lack of boyfriends and whether she too would ever have the experience of having sex one day.
"Have you ever wondered what it's like to have sex?" I asked her, hoping to guide the situation into a possible encounter.
She looked at me momentarily to see if I was sincere, or just trying to poke fun at her before answering.
"Well...., yeah...., sometimes...., but nobody really likes me much around here. All of the boys in my class just want to play by the
Did they cheat somehow? Is there some reason that these companies should NOT have been allowed to vote? Are any of them not legitimate companies? No? Then STFU and stop whining.
So since these companies are allowed to sign up... and allowed to vote... what's the deal?
It sounds like the problem was the FOSSie MS-haters were gloating for weeks about how they were going to dick over MS, and the victory they expected never materialized (just like everything else in their lives).
It may hurt you to acknowledge it, but businesses LIKE Microsoft. MS is very business-friendly, and very focused on making happy business customers.
This article is just more sour grapes for FOSSies.
He makes a good point. The only real controversy was the MS-haters thought defeating OOXML was a "done deal", and it wasn't.
Now that they have lost the vote, they are trying to generate some kind of fake outrage.
Sounds like they would be happier with a dictatorial process, rather than a democratic one.
OS/2 World??? LOLOL /. to cover the other side).
Didn't know there were still sites pimping for an OS that's been obsolete for 10 years now.
Anyway, clearly a site advocating OS/2 would have an axe to grind against Microsoft. That's fine, but I'm sure there's an opposing side to this story (not that I expect
And so what if Microsoft partners showed up to vote YES? Obviously those partners intend to use OOXML an want it to be an ISO standard. The stranger thing is that those that are opposed to OOXML being an ISO standard have no intent to use OOXML so why do they care?
Obviously, the reason the care is that they want to use ISO status as a differentiator between ODF and OOXML in lobbying efforts to convince governments to mandate exclusive use of ODF. We all know that this is about politics, not technical merit, and those that deny that are just being disingenuous.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Ahahahahahaha - and if the tards didn't see this coming, well, then they deserved it.
All it would have taken was a little line or two stating there was a waiting period, etc...but even with that, they would have just paid the money in time so they could vote.
Awesome work MS. Don't let the tards from the OOS community try and keep you down!
Buying the outcome is just another game.
Look, face facts: $2500 is roughly dick to the average large company. That's about the salary and benefits of one senior programmer for one week. When you set it up so I can invest that little piddling amount of money and cast my vote, I'm going to vote when it really matters.
The real question here isn't why Microsoft did it - it worked, so it was a perfectly smart and sensible thing to do - but why the opposition couldn't mount a defense. What, you couldn't find fifty people willing to spend $2500 to stop Microsoft? Why not?
Microsoft's partners will not hesitate to lay money on the table so their side wins. Microsoft doesn't have to bribe anyone, or pay anyone, or even encourage anyone. The story right here on Slashdot got to plenty of folks in the partner program who could volunteer $2500 and support the source of their bread's butter. Most of them didn't do it, because they just couldn't be arsed. But across all the media outlets, more than enough of them did.
So where are all the free software people? Surely SOME of you have $2500. After all, it's not the money, it's the PRINCIPLE of the thing - right?
The free software community needs to stop whining about what's fair and start thinking about how to win. Sure, I sit in an office on the Redmond campus, but having more than 40% of the market is bad for everyone - it's bad for the consumer, it's bad for the market, and it's bad for the market leader. I want to see Apple and Linux take a big-ass bite out of this market and give us some competition. But before they can do that, they have to stop all the damn whining and do something that matters.
If a community whines about competition, the very least they can do is to compete.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?