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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 $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"
Never has the old phrase been so accurate.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Too bad the truth gets lost when the money starts talking. *sigh*
We all know that M$ doesn't play fair in terms of open standards, and never will. Why are we surprised?
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
...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.
Kudos to Google for being one of those to "suddenly" join, but on the "No" side. Most of the other companies on the list of new arrivals are unfamiliar to me, excepting Google and HP, and we don't officially know how HP's vote went.
Shame on the others for having no sense of decency.
... 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))
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.
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.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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
Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.
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.
They played by the rules of the ISO. The 'normal way things are supposed to work' are apparently not what they had in mind, if they allow anyone to join at any time and vote at short notice. I agree, its dumb, but they followed the rules to a tee.
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.
And you don't think creating opinion against this is part of changing the rules?
We have monopoly laws, not to outlaw monopolies, but to prevent ONE company from using overwhelming advantage in one market from simply buying out, in turn, all and any other markets they care to. We have laws preventing this. If they were actually enforced. Microsoft would be in a straitjacket but for the Bush Justice Department walking in on a fait accompli dismantling of their corporate advantage after Judge Jackson's spanking, and simply tossing the conviction out the window by ignoring it.
Now they are openly -- brazenly -- buying markets. And the DOJ doesn't give a damn. Well, they'd best hurry, the Repubs are about to lose power for a decade or more. Steal what you can, "retired" Mr. Gates.
Only, instead of a state, we have a corporation, Microsoft.
They buy their power with their money. And a big part of their money comes from our wallets via taxes.
I mean, a really big part.
I mean a part much bigger than what you'd think.
I mean, much bigger than what I'd think, too.
I mean, *huge*.
Then, with this power, they take away what really is common goods. Or aren't "standards"?
Communism.
irrelevant in a way because ODF looks to be fast becoming a de-facto standard regardless. out numbering OOXML something in the order of 250 to 1.
a ll-ooxml-documents.html 7 0813-1201
see:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/05/so-where-are-
http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/archive/200
of course, the MS tactic is to get OOXML recognized and then default to it across the windows suite.
but as I remember they have tried this was a number of formats before - but once a file format is recognized as a de-facto standard (MP3, HTML, JPG) they are notoriously hard to shift.
irrelevant as it may be its still a damn depressing indication of the way business is done and sensible, rational decisions are perverted to line company pockets. this sort of thing annoys me.
This is a quote from the SIS.SE home page:
Translation in english: "It's not money that makes the world go around. Do you want to know what it is?"
Apparently the answer is: money
Badgers, we don't need no stinking badgers! - UHF
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:
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http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070824
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070815
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070723
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
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!"
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Perhaps it's time to write a "Capitalist Manifesto"
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
If that's not integrity, what is?
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.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Hmm. If things continue this way, and we end up with the ISO effectively rubber-stamping OOXML on the strength of purchased votes, what effect will this have on the ISO's credibility in the long run? The ISO looks after a lot more standards than just data exchange formats; will we have to consider that every single one of those standards is potentially bought and paid for by its richest benecifiaries, despite technical flaws in the standard and opposition from peers?
I can't help thinking that the OOXML standardisation effort should be shelved until one of two things becomes true: either at least two or more independent implementations, developed by distinct organisations from the specification alone, can be shown to interoperate to a degree that justifies the moniker "standard"; or preferably, a complete reference implementation, with full source code available under a BSD (or equally permissive) licence, is submitted with the proposal. In fact, I can't understand why this isn't, er, standard practice. Were it so, the OOXML efforts could be trivially dismissed on technical grounds, and this whole dog and pony show could be avoided.
This story is (anonymously) tagged "conspiracytheory". I'd like to see the coincidence theorist explain how this happened without Microsoft's trademark coordinating manipulations.
--
make install -not war
The vote shouldn't be based on a company's interest, but in the functionality and necessity of the standard.
is not that Microsoft bought all those votes - but that the ISO let them. And that we can't do anything about it. Or can we? I'd love to know how.
Have you evidence of this?
I think you'll find that the law changes are only to require "open" standards, which is *why* MS are pursuing ISO certification now. If this wasn't the case, then why would a company who own (I'm guessing here) 99% of the "office" application market and have done for a good number of years, suddenly decide they need certification?
Also, the only reason OOXML gets a slating 'round these parts, is because it is a very poor "standard", and it appears to omit enough detail to make it hard (if not impossible) for anyone to create an alternative implementation.
It's worth noting that MS is entirely free to create an implementation based around ODF if they want to, and given their immense resources, they could probably do a good job of it if they so chose; but sadly, they seem to base all of their decisions on perceived threats. For example, if OOXML failed to get ISO certification (or if they had not even tried to obtain it) and a number of governments mandated open standards, given MS's *huge* installed base, I expect the majority would be far more inclined to switch to an MS ODF implementation. But MS seem to believe that if their customers had a choice, they'd leave! Microsoft lacks confidence IMHO; that's why they behave like bullies.
...so long as MS is against the wall. Blindfolds or not, I don't care.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
- 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.The first steps to countering these kinds of shennanigans is bringing them to light. Change the rules? Maybe. But definitely make sure everyone understands what is going on first. Let's call a spade a spade.
Microsoft will likely call it as some kind of standards mandate; justification for their work. Denial of their critics. We can sit back and accept that. Or we can let everyone know how Microsoft's interests subverted the process and, perhaps, not everything Microsoft claims is as it seems.
Meanwhile, those who own this process can review how a single interest subverted it and decide if the system is serving their interests or not. I like to think the ISO process is about technical review and standardization for the general good of the industry those they serve. But maybe it's not.
This reminds me of a political joke I heard somewhere. I've adapted it to programming.
God was in a good mood and decided to give virtues to people. One day he decided to give all the programmers in the world three virtues:
They would be smart, well-intentioned, and work for Microsoft. But an angel told him: Hey, wait a minute, aren't they too many virtues?
"You're right", said God. "They'll have these virtues but a person can only have two of these virtues at the same time".
Since then, programmers in the world were divided in the three following groups:
Programmers who were smart and well-intentioned, couldn't work for Microsoft.
Programmers who were smart and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be well-intentioned.
Programmers who were well-intentioned and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be smart.
4 parties, including IBM left without a vote.
So I think these parties would have voted no so the result would have been 5-10-3.
Looks much better.
What power has law where only money rules.
Not exactly.
Supporters of open standards wish for Microsoft to adhere to a true standard, one that is well-documented, easily implemented, and available for all. Currently, ODF does all that.
OOXML, on the other hand, is obtuse, hard to implement (even for Microsoft), leaves much unspecified, and is Microsoft-centric, rather than document-centric.
The problem is actually with Microsoft. They have rigged the system to favor their platform above all others, rather than risk losing their stranglehold on your documents. If Microsoft were to support ODF, and participate in the OASIS working group once again, their office suite would have to compete entirely on merit. A person or company could use the office suite of their choice, and exchange documents with no difficulty.
The place to make money is in the friction. The more friction there is-- that is, the more painful *not* using your product or service is-- the more money you can charge. Microsoft is great at increasing friction by manipulating the market.
Microsoft is ensuring they are able to keep up the friction.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Steal what you can, "retired" Mr. Gates.
You fail to see the point in here. Microsoft has become a living entity. It's not Gates, nor Ballmer. It's Microsoft itself, along with its shareholders and leaders. Its corporate structure has been adapted to become a monopoly, and to step on everything to fulfill its goals. Anyone disagreeing with it is rejected, and seen as a pathogen agent to keep the system running.
Microsoft has become a cancer for the free world, and it must die.
You're describing corporatism, not capitalism.
Capitalism is based on supply and demand, where companies or individuals create the supply to fill the demands of the customer. It is as simple as that. (Okay, it's never as simple as that.)
As soon as you support powerful corporations manipulating the market in any way, you are not longer a capitalist. You are a corporatist.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The ODF supporters are trying to block OOXML from becoming a standard ONLY because they've lobbied governments into passing open standards laws that will REQUIRE those governments to use their format if OOXML fails. They don't give a damn if it's the best format or not; they want a monopoly enforced by law.
Nonsense. The ODF supporters want an open format, so that there is no more microsoft lock-in in the office applications market. Some of these are indeed supporting it for commercial reasons (sun and google), but most of the ODF supporters are in it for transparency in government.
The case against OOXML on technical grounds has been made. The format is not open. See this link if you want more info: http://ooxmlisdefectivebydesign.blogspot.com/
I don't think these twenty Servants of the Beast played by the rules of the ISO.
We (can and should) expect from that organisation decisions based on technical merit, the OOXML has no such thing.
But even if the ISO cert would be granted I eventually expect court cases evolving out of the inherent contradiction of calling it an Open Standard and at the same time referring to closed sources.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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?
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,
?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.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
I assume that HP voted YES because they voted YES in the recent US vote that took place on 08/24/2007, the results of which were YES 12, NO 3, ABSTAIN 1, which was enough to approve OOXML.
/. carried a story trumpeting the previous "NO" vote, but hasn't done a story on the more recent YES vote.
You can see how each party voted here:
US OOXML VOTE 08/24/2007
Notable YES votes include MS, HP, APPLE, INTEL, SONY.
Notable NO votes were IBM.
It's amusing that slashdot carried hugh headlines for the NO vote, but hasn't covered the YES vote at all (unless I just missed it).
BTW, the US YES vote is a reversal of the 08/10/2007 US vote that was YES 8, NO 7, ABSTAIN 1, which was not enough for approval (which led to premature celebration by IBM's allies):
US OOXML VOTE 08/10/2007
You can check the two links to see which parties flipped from NO to YES. The most notable is the DoD.
It's amusing that
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Maybe it's time for another DOJ action.
But, probably not for another year, as long as Bush is pres.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
It is stories like this that keep me as a vocal and vehement opponent to Microsoft. In my view, this business and its practices are examples for all that is wrong with software today.
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
When I was a member of the ANSI C and C++ standards committees the rule was that you had to have attended two of the last three meetings to be able to vote. But that was ANSI, NOT the Swedish Standards Institute which will have its own rules that apparently (and unsurprisingly) are not the same as ANSI. Its position is then relayed to the ISO/IEC process and is then subject to the rules of procedure that apply there. Each national body is free to make up its own rules as long as it's happy to live by the outcome.
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. Indeed, and I will go one further: the fact that there is so much controversy over the proposal should immediately tank it, regardless of who 'wins'. Standards are based on CONSENSUS, not mob rule. Given the evident controversy, the proposal clearly is not ready for standardization, let alone by a 'fast-track' process. If at some point, the political controversy dies down, ECMA-376 matures, and the industry shows some sings of consensus, let the proposal be resubmitted. But if there is a *hint* of impropriety in the process, tank it. It is better to have fewer better standards than more mediocre ones. There is no rush (to anyone but MS) to put an ISO imprimatur on ECMA-376. ISO typically sees its mandate as standardizing best-practice, not invention. ECMA-376 does not exist in the marketplace and has no history behind it. The arguments are largely mooted by an insistence that the proposal be allowed to mature (and the politics to settle) before being standardized. Given that ISO has an existing standard in this domain, it is hard to see how anyone is (legitimately) hurt by delay.
Recruiters always told me that working for them I could "make a real difference, be a voice for the customers/end-users, unlike anywhere else". I saw that my managers, many of whom had put in 8+ years already, were just getting to a point where they were consulted during initial requirements gathering phases.
It's a simple matter of complex programming.
Yeah, because a company with $40,000,000,000 in the bank could not have just hired people to make a standard people want to use.
Sure they could. But you're missing the point: They don't want to!. They would've prefered no standards at all and the status quo of being allowed to essentially define the standard -- the standard is whatever the latest office does. Only as it became obvious that people would no longe accept that did they go for a standard at all. And now they're doing their best to make a "standard" that nevertheless makes it impossible to create competing products that support the "standard" like they do.
From the POV of Microsoft the extreme pagecount, the lack of specification, the uncompleteness, the conflicting statements are features, not bugs. The proposed standard is as it is not because they can't afford to improve it. It is like it is because they want it that way.
We should expect people to behave like scheming pricks when we're designing systems which confer influence; Like electoral systems, ISO standards etc. Because there are psychopaths, sociopaths and others with defective personalities out there who'll simply use them to their personal advantage.
To do otherwise is not just naive or unwise, it's downright stupid.
Deleted
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Do you know what a "non sequitur" is? It is when you make a statement like "False" in response to my claim that monopolies undermine the free market, and then you follow that statement with more statements that in no way back up your argument.
Firstly you get the types of monopolies wrong. There are natural monopolies which result from natural phenomenon, such as geography and there are monopolies imposes by unnatural forces such as a law, a lock-in technology, or via bundling. Secondly, any monopoly can be abused to undermine a free market. Because of natural monopolies it is not illegal to obtain a monopoly in a market, merely to abuse it by undermining a second market using your first monopoly.
Lets look at an extreme example of a natural monopoly for the sake of clarity. Suppose a meteor falls to earth with strange properties we cannot duplicate and that meteor is owned by an individual whose property it landed on. Now suppose, by drinking water that has been mixed with a small amount of this meteor you could extend your life to double or triple its normal span. The man being the only source for this substance, has a natural monopoly which is perfectly legal and while it does not conform to normal free market behavior, does not undermine any market. The problem is when that monopoly is abused to affect other markets. Suppose, for example, The man refused to sell the magical water outright, but instead agreed to sell only an expensive lifestyle package including a mansion, 4 cars, 3 pets, a wardrobe of clothing, a small jet plane, and a yacht. Well since everyone who wants said water has to buy all of these things as well, the markets for these other things is undermined. Many sellers of luxury yachts might go out of business since everyone who can afford a yacht already has one from our monopolist. It does not matter if the yachts sold by our monopolist are somewhat inferior or even if they cost 10 times the price of a similar yacht. Because it is bundled it has broken the free market.
Any monopoly can be used to undermine other markets via tying including bundling, thus monopolies are restrained by the law from undermining other markets. Microsoft is the example of the day because they not only have several monopolies but are constantly abusing those monopolies to undermine more and more markets in blatant defiance of the law. Their entire business plan is built around breaking antitrust law for profit, then tying things up in court as long as possible, paying of politicians, and paying off the lawsuits from the small number of victims who have enough money to get their claims through the courts.
Thanks for the link, by the way, but I've already read Greenspan's commentary as well as more about monopolies than most people who are not economics majors. I understand them just fine, you simply failed to understand either what I was saying, or how it applied.