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Sweden's Vote on OOXML Invalidated
Groklaw Reader writes "Just days after Microsoft's attempt to buy the Swedish vote on OOXML came to light, SIS declared its own vote invalid. The post at Groklaw references a ComputerWorld article with revelations from Microsoft: 'Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format's approval as an ISO standard. Microsoft said the offer, when discovered, was quickly retracted and that its Sweden managers voluntarily notified the SIS, the national standards body. "We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy," said Tom Robertson, general manager for interoperability and standards at Microsoft. "That communication had no impact on the final vote." ...'"
other then eliminating a voter.
Yep, but it is still kinda shameful that now they're trying to pretend it was a rogue employee *after* the story's long since hit the media, though.
Do you mean "Sorry we got caught, wei'll try not to get caught doing it again"?
My web domain.
Never allowed to vote again? Agreed, would love to see a widely publicized list of the companies so willing to sell their votes as well, the Swedish people, the EU, and the rest of the world need to know who is too untrustworthy to ever again do business with. Ethnics will be more prevalent in this world when the perceived penalties for unethical behaviour are great enough to practice ethical behaviour. Unfortunately too, many seem to have been raised to think such dishonest things are expected of them, instead of ethical and honourable behaviour.
What's inconsistent with Microsoft's policy is getting caught doing this.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What is interesting to me is that Microsoft still gets caught cheating in email all these years after the anti-trust scandals. I'm sure their lawyers are pulling their hair out trying to get the managers to stop sending things like this by email. They have a corporate culture of cheating, and they reward it internally, and it is indisputably part of what made them successful, but it has also become such a normal state of affairs that they have problems hiding it. Pretty amusing that such a relatively old technology is their continual downfall.
I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress -J Adams
If this vote was bought. What about all the previous ones? How much is the SIS worth?
The organisation has instantly lost all credibility.
Deleted
Bottom line:
Microsoft failed in it's attempt to buy a 'YES' vote from Sweden.
Microsoft successfully used it's money to turn Sweden's 'NO' vote into an 'ABSTAIN' vote.
Miles
What's more alarming to me is that there is simply no way that OOXML is a rational standard, the voters clearly are not expert at it, nobody is backing it with an alternative implementation. I don't even believe an alternative implementation is really possible at this point, it's just not clear to me. Can you imagine how the internet wouldn't even exist if IETF standards were approached this way? It is very clear to me that the folks voting on this standard have not read it, it's 7000 pages, there simply isn't a way that they did. I don't want to out right just bash MS but they came late to the game and they simply have no track record of pushing for open standards, it's almost against their very nature. To ramrod this though will ultimately just undermine what it means for something to be "standard" and standards committee members should be aware of that, this won't make OOXML the standard so much as it will undermine the very concept of a standard for this technology. The fact that nobody on the committee is putting the brakes on to me indicates just how broken this comittee is and that the standard should be either dropped or restarted. If they aren't taking is seriously, then let's just kill the standard, I'd rather have none than a bullshit one.
Open document formats is something that is fairly important. I bet you'd have trouble dealing with a lot of common document formats from just 15 years ago. Anyone process Wordperfect 4.2 and 5 files? How about Wordstar? Multimate anyone? Sure you can probably find a way to important them and make them usable but what about in another 5 years? As we digitize more documents, right now, we're almost making sure that in 100 years this will be a dark spot in history because they won't be able to process what records may exist, if they can get them off of the media (if the media is even good) It's good for mankind to produce some well defined, open and sane standards, it's also pretty good for business, how many formats does Office currently try to support? How much does that cost? Imagine if Office 2015 only supported like 3. I don't know what kinds of numbers MS spends on it, I'm guessing millions of dollars a year just on supporting Office file formats though and I couldn't imagine it really impacting the use of Office, it's a fine piece of software. I really don't even care if it's properly documented OOXML instead of the OASIS/OO.org XML format, it just needs to be properly documented and that documentation needs to be vetted before a vote happens. Maybe that's what MS really wants but these committee members are representing corporate interests as well as national ones in some cases and I can't possibly see how they can justify the job they are doing. No standard is better than a really fucked up one.
It is true that these kinds of things don't exactly increase the respect for the standards organizations like SIS, but when looking at it from their side, I don't think that it's very easy to come up with something that they could have done to prevent it. After all, the companies that were hired to vote for Microsoft were still independent companies in their own right. I think it's hard to think of a reason why they should not have been allowed to vote.
What good are the docs, for $50 or for free, if the they aren't correct and can't be used to produce and accurately parse ooxml documents?
At least they're fixing it. Sure, it'd be great if nothing had gone wrong to begin with, but things will and it's important to know that someone will do something about it, so I'll give Sweden some respect for that.
Meanwhile, something like 40 countries have just decided that they want "P" status in the ISO (i.e. to be able to vote). Most, if not all, of them have gotten stuffed to the gills with Microsoft Partners who joined recently.
So it's not just Sweden, and it remains to be seen whether these other countries will be able to do anything in time, or whether the ISO will get turned into a Microsoft puppet. Now *there* is a scary thought. No further standards without Microsoft's blessing? Ouch! I don't think they'll give up on the power they're gaining from this any time soon, not given how much money it must've cost to run a global campaign like this.
I have no source, but I have always been under the impression that the rules have been like this because standardization has been considered a kind of "gentleman" activity. Microsoft has now shown that they can't be trusted in gentleman cirlces and that, since Microsoft is around, rules will have to be changed all over the place.
On a national scale, it depends on each country how they decided to do the voting process: from "there are not enough chairs in this room so you must stay outside" via "my wife is a lawyer and she says it's safe" to "sure you can come in on the last week, pay, and get to vote without us vetting whether you've even read the standard". It's almost as if national bureau members are real people who don't know how to react when a violent drunk suddenly shows up at the birthday party and starts pissing in the bowl of crisps :-)
I am not at all involved in any of this, but I'd be very angry if: I was a legit member of such a committee, wrestled through the 6000 pages for 5 months, carefully writing down my comments, and then it's all invalidated because Microsoft votes "yes", vetoing the other 5? members vote "no with comments", so according to dutch rules it's a "we're not in consensus so we'll have to officially shut up about it and tell ISO that we the dutch don't have anything to say about document production standards":
I couldn't find *ANYTHING* about it at first on www.nen.nl which is odd.. however just now I found a press release saying in extremely neutral terms that no consensus could be reached: Nederlandse standpunt bepaald over ratificatie norm 'Office Open XML file formats'On the other hand, there's a press release from one of the parties (who presumably voted "no with comments" because all parties except Microsoft did): isoc.nl statement which paints a much more negative picture.
I think the outcome "abstain without comments" is ridiculous for a highly industrialized country with a corresponding large production of documents. We don't want an immature document standard, thank you very much. We have a working standard already. Just use ODF, and if it needs to be expanded (e.g. to incorporate elements of Chinese UOF), then fine.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?