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If This Was a Month Ago, OOXML Would Be Over
Andy Updegrove writes "Public announcements of how Participating members of ISO have voted on OOXML are now rolling in one at a time, and the trend thus far is meaningfully weighted towards 'No with comments.' By my count, there are now four announced Yes votes, with comments, two abstentions, and seven public No with comments votes for OOXML in ISO/IEC JT1. Korea has reportedly voted no as well, and I expect at least Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom to announce 'No with comments' today or tomorrow. There will be more no votes on the roster when the final results are announced in a day or two. But even if the 11 votes I know of now were the only votes, the vote would now have failed — but for the 11 countries that upgraded their status from Observer to Participating member status in the last few weeks. Without those extra 11 'P' countries, it would only require 10 votes to block OOXML from immediate approval. If most or all of those additional 'P' members vote 'yes' as expected, it will confirm suspicions that Microsoft has promoted extra votes in favor of OOXML not only within National Bodies, but within ISO itself."
Eric S. Raymond (ESR) commented on Microsoft's OOXML tactics as they relate to their proposed open source licenses in a OSI blog entry.
I agree pretty much with his position. If the playing field were anything near to level, I would have no issue in evaluating Microsoft's license submissions purely on their merits, just like any other license. However, I have difficulty in reconciling Microsoft wanting to be treated fairly by OSI with Microsoft's tactics in their attempts to ram OOXML through ISO. If Microsoft can game the ISO approval process, shouldn't it be fair for us to game the OSI approval process?
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Yes, the collective hive-mind of /. does care and in the latest newsletter there was the quote "we want this voted down!".
...or.. "People with Microsoft Office can talk to the government!". So there's been a raising of consciousness around how file formats cost countries tens or hundreds of millions of dollars each year.
... let alone the problems other vendors have)
You see, a few years ago governments all around the world started realizing that when they send ".doc" files to the public they're asking people to go spend money with a particular company to read that file. Governments shouldn't say "People with FIRESTONE tyres get to stay on the road!"
What Governments should do is say "People whose cars pass certain tests can stay on the road!" or "People with an Office Suite that uses a published standard can talk to us!". That way it encourages competition, "innovation", and cut-throat pricing.
Microsoft could tell where the wind was blowing, and they began trying to get the International Standards Organisation (ISO) to rubber-stamp their 6000 page proposed standard... a standard called OOXML. An Open Standard sounded like a great idea but the question was: Had Microsoft really told everyone their secret mix of herbs and spices? Well, no, because as it turned out many things in OOXML were left undefined and the only vendor capable of implementing OOXML was Microsoft.
(and even they're having problems
Now although ISO haven't announced anything it looks like it's going to go "No" for Microsoft.
This doesn't affect what software individuals or the private sector choose, but people who should use standards (government and government vendors) do care about this decision. Actually, individuals and the private sector probably should care because more competition in the office suite market may lower the cost of Microsoft Office.
A country's "no" can turn into a "yes" when an issue is addressed at the ballot resolution meeting (I think) so the more "no"s the better because otherwise a single country could just swing it in favour of OOXML. The more "no"s the larger the safety net, so it'll be interesting to see what the final vote is.
So I'd expect that in the coming days there'll be a lot of analysis of whether the actual comments in the "No, with comments" from each country are fundamental problems or superficial quirks. Can any particular country be swung to vote yes easily?
Still, it's a great start. The noooxml crowd are predicting 18 "no"s.
Not that I have a lot of experience with standards (my group's leader at work has written a new ISO standard and it's going through the process right now), but that is NOT the way the company I work at handles standards. Of course the company I work at has a longer history that MS and mostly deals with machinery safety standards, which you can not mess around with. But all the same an ISO standard is an ISO standard, you should respect the process and make a good standard, and respect your peers in the industry when they bring up issues. I don't think MS has the respect for ISO's authority at all, and until they do, I don't think ISO should pay one wit of attention to them. Same goes for OSI (that's strange... did any one realize the are different sides of the same coin... so to speak) and MS's shared-source licenses.
A simple analogy: I teacher does not teach to a student who thinks they have nothing to learn. Nor does a good teacher allow said student to interrupt class. That student should be on their own if they don't want to participate in a constructive way. Alone in a corner. Cleaning the erasers.
That's my take on it. Of course someone will prove my analogy wrong, but it's more fun that way... fire away!
Money is the root of all evil?
Yes, maybe I'm being paranoid. Being paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you!
If I were in MS strategy I would buy the new 'P' members and have them vote 'No with comments,' ensuring the comments were easily addressed and trivial. This would add validity to the next vote when all of the pocketed participants vote Yes as their comments had been addressed.
I have a hard time believing that MS would stack the deck so blatantly, but have no doubt that they would do so in a more covert manner. Long story short, don't be surprised if a number of the new voting members vote no initially.
Regards.
I agree, its not how a company should handle things. However Microsoft is part of two "groups" of businesses that don't think the way a company like yours do. #1: Software Companies. A very good way of handling software development (not that everyone agrees, but it DOES work, in many, MANY scenarios) is "Fail early, fail often". Since in most areas (not stuff like medical and such...), it isn't going to kill anyone, it is more efficient to push software out and find kinks as you go. Its not even always out of disrespect for your customers, because it is a good way to get solid software faster even when its just internally! (so there's no customers to screw over).
An inexperienced (with standards, which would make sense considering MS) MS project manager probably tried to apply this rational, while everyone around him tried to stop him, but on that day, he was in charge, and he screwed it up for everyone. Probably a group of project manager even.
The second group MS belongs to, is the "money-first" business kind. Where all these standards and ethics are pretty much just a way to make money. This where MS is on the "evil" side rather than just on the "dumb" side like the first group. They'll learn the hard way.
Anyway, not the best analogy in the world, but point is, the kind of businesses that handle more "real" things (like yours) tend to think very very differently from software/business companies, who (usually) work more with abstract concepts, and where usually no one gets killed. And a huge machine like Microsoft can't change in 1 day. Even if Steve Balmer was a -saint-, it would still not be possible to steer that ship in one shot. So expect MS to fuck up a lot in the next couple of years.
If in 20+ years they're still alive, they'll probably be quite different from what we've seen in the last couple of decades. The market is showing that their ways won't work much longer, and they'll end as the next Novell if they aren't careful. So like you said, ISO shouldn't give them any respect, until MS learns, which comes down to what I said. If at first you don't succeed, try again.
I'm sure when the company you work for just started working with standards and such (which they probably did at some point... as they probably were too small at first for that), they made mistakes. Its not because Microsoft is big that its any smarter. Especially since Microsoft's side is mostly split up in tiny pieces, and its one of those tiny portions that messed up on OOXML.
This probably isn't driven by MS strategy. More marketing's realm, one would think.
Add to it that Office has been Microsoft's bread and butter for a decade now, and all truly threatening competition was pretty much quashed when Word Perfect fell. Now you have a situation where there has only been one extremely strong player in the business document production arena since before 'Internet' was a household word. There's a pile of money riding on this - not really in the US, where PC software is pretty sewn up - but overseas. A good rational look at the situation, and do you REALLY think the entire US government is going to go to OpenOffice? Yeah, no. But if OOXML is a standard it gives M$ sales a slight chance at selling developing countries' governments while their technical base is less knowledgeable about OSS.
Microsoft doesn't really HAVE to care about the US anymore; inertia will keep them in business here for the foreseeable future, like it has IBM despite some horrific failure. It's expansion markets (which, amusingly enough, probably won't listen to an American company as well as they would have before Mr. Gates got his way and a Republican shattered our reputation in the world) that M$ needs for stock prices to go up.
My little site.
This is no different than how MS subverted the IETF process in the early '90s. And not really fundamentally different than how MS subverted web standards to undermine Netscape.
They went about this by following two tracks:
-
On one track, they made life unbearable for the CIO at Massachusetts -- and also his successor, who also understood the issues at hand
... until they finally ended up with a CIO who would swallow.
- On the other track they suddenly decided to submit their XMLish document format to ECMA to make it an 'open' standard.
... but huge chunks of the 'XML-standard' were actually embeded binary chunks who's documentation consisted of "Uhm, reverse engineer Office-97 to figure this out, OK?". Even with these huge chunks effectively MIA, their 'standard' still consisted of over 6000 pages -- in part, because OOXML eschews international standards in favour of entrenching 20 years of MS bugs (like thinking that 1900 was a leap year, and encoding language types in wonky ways)
- You could end up with a nominally OOXML implementation which didn't support these chunks,
- Implementations of these chunks wouldn't be protected by Microsoft's patent grants for the ECMA standard,
- Microsoft could (and did) then promote these undocumented and unprotected features as 'critical aspects' of OOXML -- that any competitors who wanted to produce a competing OOXML implementation have a hard time (both technically and legally) implementing.
In short, OOXML allows microsoft to claim (to technically illiterate political cheque-signers) that Office 2007 uses an Open, XML-based document format -- but do it in a way that pretty much ensures them that nobody that's not a Microsoft lap-dog will be able to legally create an implementation that can actually read most Office 2007 documents. (or -- at the very least -- it will take them years to put something legal together, by which time Ofice 2007 will have squeezed Open Office out of the market).More problmatically, Microsoft made supporting some of these odities 'optional', which means that
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