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." ...'"

Comments

SIS press release translated

[Christian Engstrom]

Here is a translation of the OOMXL press release from SIS today:

PRESS RELEASE
From SIS, Swedish Standards Institute
August 30, 2007

Office Open XML - SIS invalidates the vote

The swedish working group at SIS, Swedish Standards Institute, Document description languages SIS/TK 321/AG 17, decided in a vote on August 27, 2007, to vote yes to making Office Open XML an ISO standard. Today, the board of SIS decided to invalidate the vote.

The reason for the board's decision is that the SIS has information indicating that one of the participants of the working group cast more than one vote. This is not compatible with SIS rules, which stipulate that each project sponsor has only one vote. Thus, the decision has been taken solely based on SIS rules. The decision does not reflect a position on the subject matter.

Furthermore, the board considers it impossible for practical and formal reasons for the Swedish working group to arrange a new vote before September 2, 2007, when the global vote will be finished. If a new Swedish vote cannot be arranged, Sweden will abstain from voting.

Background
The proposal that Sweden has had under consideration is, briefly, about definig document formats for word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. Office Open XML has its origins in the need to store electronic documents long term, and to be able to migrate files between different applications. The ISO vote will be finished on September 2, 2007.

SIS is an independent non-profit organization, where the members' needs and wishes decide the direction for the standardization work. The members come from companies, organizations, and authorities.

For further information etc...

Please feel free to share, improve, or use this translation as you wish. Sharing is caring. Arrr! :)

Re:SIS press release translated

[Iphtashu Fitz]

As far as Microsoft is concerned an abstention is as good as a yes vote

I'm not so sure about this. This has pretty much blown up in MS's face thanks to all the publicity its generated. Keep in mind that MS is still facing anti-trust charges in the EU, and behavior like this won't help with that. On top of that it'll likely focus a lot of attention on all the other ISO member votes. Every single vote will likely be scrutinized closely by the press & public to look for even the slightest possibility of involvement by MS.

What I think will be more important in the long run is how the ISO handles this. If they implement procedures to prevent this sort of abuse in the future then it'll help the ISO process. If they don't do anything then it just reinforces the belief by many that the ISO process can simply be bought & co-opted by companies like MS.

Re:SIS press release translated

[ILikeRed]

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.

Theft

[Das Auge]

Well it's good to know that, after I commit my first robbery, every robbery after that is no big deal.

Not because of Microsofts actions

[sokkalf]

This article (in swedish) http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.118680 says that the decision to invalidate the vote was because of one voter voting twice, not because of Microsofts actions regarding the vote. Sweden will probably not have time to do another round of voting, so it looks as they will abstain.

Re:Not because of Microsofts actions

[McNihil]

Reading the pdf from SIS directly it doesn't say that.

It says:

"Motivet till styrelsens beslut är att SIS har information som pekar på att en av deltagarna i arbetsgruppen har deltagit i omröstningen med mer än en röst."

which is saying that: one of the participants have used more than one vote.

Nothing about two or three... more than one. This is the diplomatic way NOT to make it even more blatantly clear that it was Microsoft or is about Microsoft. The part "information som pekar" indicates that they don't have 100% written/audio/video proof and thus this rather "meek" abjection of vote.

In other words

[Trogre]

"We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy"

Sorry we got caught, we'll try not to let it happen again.

Re:No impact...

[Aminion]

Actually, this has significantly worsened Microsofts's reputation in Sweden. IT people here are outraged and, actually, quite embarrassed that something like this could have happened in Sweden. Voices are being raised that the voting process at SIS must be changed so that charlatan companies such as MS can't pull stunts like this - i.e. "encouraging" partners to become SIS members in the last moment to be able to vote - in the future.

For those who speak Swedish, here's the press release by SIS (PDF).

Policy

[laron]

"We had a situation where an employee sent a communication via e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy"

Said policy probably states that such communication should never happen over a traceable and archivable medium.

Re:It seems to be the logical step

[clashdot]

You are right; they should not arbitrarily change the rules. However, the official reason why the vote was nullified was not that Microsoft bought themselves a bunch of sock puppets, but that one member at the meeting voted twice. The voting was done by a show of hand, and most likely it was Microsoft themselves, who had three representatives in the room, that by accident and in the excitement of the moment had two of those raise their hands. Reports from the meeting inform us that at that point the mood was ecstatic, the Microsoft goons cheering and applauding as they trumped their line through.

The SIS is now vigorously denying that there is any other reason why the nullified the vote other than this technically proper reason to do so. Of course that is not true; the SIS board saw a way to salvage some of their credibility, built in a century and squandered in a day, by grasping onto this technicality.

That being said, I do think the SIS voting model is fundamentally wrong and broken. The rules do indeed allow the party with the deepest pockets to carry the day. I'm sure this has happened before and it will happen again. I hope the SIS will not get away with this without implementing some thorough reform of how they operate. The same goes for the bodies in other countries that turned out to be easily corruptible.

What's Inconsistent

[Nom du Keyboard]

e-mail that was inconsistent with our corporate policy

What's inconsistent with Microsoft's policy is getting caught doing this.

The diffusion theory of Evil

[Colin Smith]

Hopefully more people will realize how flat out EVIL that company is because of this. One of the interesting things about Microsoft is the high concentration of evil within the organisation. I have a theory that they have managed to attract or suck the evil from many surrounding areas. This leaves an evil gradient, from those who work in the company, through their trading partners into the general I.T. marketplace where there is now a general lack of evil.

This is clearly shown by the Google, "Do No Evil" corporate slogan. More a statement of the inability to perform evil due to the concentration gradient and general lack of evil available.

Re:No impact...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this has significantly worsened Microsofts's reputation in Sweden. IT people here are outraged and, actually, quite embarrassed that something like this could have happened in Sweden.

If that's outrageous, then quite a few people need to open their eyes and wake up. This sort of vote-buying and behind the scenes sleaze happens all the time during standards resolution, not just for OOXML, not even just in IT. Corruption is the standard, not the exception. There's probably not an ISO spec in existence that hasn't in some way been influenced by proprietary interests through bribery or outright threats. In this case the perpetrator happened to be exposed. When international standards touted by multi-billion-dollar corporations come into play, you'd have to be a fool to think such things are not common place.

Microsoft still wins.

[dweller_below]

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

How can they call this a standard?

[AxelTorvalds]

Whether or not they buy a vote seems almost immaterial to me. You know vendors tend to have seats on a lot of these types of standards committees and there is always a lot of personal protection going on. You'll never see Cisco at an IETF meeting backing something Cisco hasn't built already or backing something that is alternative to what Cisco is doing unless they've already decided to do it and by then they've usually built one.. IBM usually has an agenda before they get to ANSI or ISO or whatever the standards group is. Every company is that way. The smart ones go out of their ways to document the ever loving hell out of their technologies too so that it stands a better chance in these standards meetings and the really smart ones are open to accepting new ideas for their technology so that it can be standardized and have some consensus. (Do you really want to fight some obscure issue, of just ammend your standard to include it and make another company vote for it as a friend and supporter of the standard?)

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.

Re:How can they call this a standard?

[bwt]

nobody is backing it with an alternative implementation

Nobody is backing it with ANY implementation. Stéphane Rodriguez documented several non-trivial ways that MS Office fails to conform to OOXML. The purpose for MS is to waive their ISO standard around when government organizations try to insist on open standard file formats in procurement policy. The whole thing is disgusting. This may be the lowest I've ever seen MS stoop.

nobody is backing it with an alternative implementation
The sad thing here is that MS is succeeding at showing that the credibility of the standards creation process is defective. Simply put, there aren't any standards for standards.

Re:No impact...

[p2sam]

Sweden was ranked #6 in the 2006 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. Perhaps they wouldn't do so well next year.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781359.html

What is microsoft actually trying to achieve?

[MSPK]

Can anyone with some insight into the matter explain to me why microsoft is trying so badly to get OOXML accepted as a standard, and doesn't simply support ODF? Are there technical reasons (are Microsoft Office documents somehow easier to store in OOXML than ODF)? Political reasons (is Microsoft trying to control/corrupt an open standard, kinda like they did with Internet Explorer and HTML)? Cause in the end both formats try to be the exact same thing: An open standard to store documents. Why go through all the trouble?

Re:What is microsoft actually trying to achieve?

[Emetophobe]

If everyone uses ODF, Microsoft loses their Office monopoly. There's no reason to use Office if there are better and cheaper alternatives which can read and write the same open document format. What Microsoft wants is a format that they claim is "open", but actually can only be properly understood by Microsoft Office. Without OOXML, Microsoft could stand to lose millions, maybe billions from companies switching away from Microsoft Office products (no more vendor lock-in).

If ODF succeeds, Microsoft stands to lose a ton of money in the long run, this is unacceptable to Microsoft, so they will do anything they can to push their not-so-open OOXML format.

Re:What is microsoft actually trying to achieve?

[jbengt]

MS wants to be in control.
If there's a truly open consensus format, Ms won't be able to lock in users as easily.
If MS controls the format, they can pull the rug out from under others by extending it, since MS Word is the only (partial) implementation, and MS Word is a defacto monopoly, nobody else has a chance to keep up.

MS doesn't want to do the hard work of making their .exes work with somebody else's format. MSOOXML apparently closely follows their internal document structure, seomwhat of an enhanced memory dump. This gives MS the advantage of doing less work to be compatible with MS Office, while making it hard for others to keep up. It also means that borked ideas, like getting leap years wrong in 1900 (backwards compatible to Lotus' mistake from 20 years ago), having MS or Mac Office compatible base date options, not using ISO date formats, tagging things differently in different contexts, etc., work in MS' favor, but nobody else's. It also allows for propreitary blobs, like ActiveX objects, to be embedded between "XML" tags.

And to answer another comment to the parent, no, there is no real .doc backwards compatibility in MSOOXML, unless you count unelucidated black-box-type tags like "Line_Spacing_Like_Word_95" (not an exact tag, I forget the examples)

But basically, there are a lot of governments and other institutions that want open formats, and are finally starting to formally insist on them. ODF started getting traction, so MSOOXML is MS's fast track response to try to stop the bleeding.

You sure about that?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:You sure about that?

[kripkenstein]

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.

That is precisely what is going to happen, and yes, it is scary.

Once, Microsoft had an unchallenged monopoly on the desktop. They didn't have to bother with standards; standards didn't matter, since Microsoft could basically unilaterally decide what actually was used in IT. "ISO shmISO", as they might say in these parts.

Then, something strange happened - some governments decided they cared about standards after all, and things like ODF looked like they might get a foothold. Therefore Microsoft started to 'standardize' their offerings: .NET, and now OOXML. To ensure this process succeeds, they have to control the standard-governing bodies, and given their historical lack of shame and endless pockets, they will simply buy them. And this is exactly what we see happening.

The first step for Microsoft is to get its products stamped as 'standards'. The next is to prevent competing projects from getting stamped as such. I expect to see, within a decade or so, that Microsoft products all carry ISO and ECMA logos, while Linux, OpenOffice, etc. will get derided by media shills as "those products that don't implement important international standards like OOXML, MicrosoftHTML, MicrOSoftIX, MS-DB" and other things I can't imagine right now, but I am sure Microsoft strategists will.

Re:It has *seriously* damaged *Sweden's* reputatio

[Nullav]

I don't think that it's very easy to come up with something that they could have done to prevent it.

No voting without being a member for a set amount of time, and no voting on issues presented before joining come to mind.

That makes me wonder...

[gringer]

If there were a drive to get through an ISO specification on ISO corruption (i.e. the recommended way to influence others to get the specification you want), would that also be corrupted? And if so, would the corruption follow the procedure in the specification?