Jeremy Allison On Microsoft, OOXML and Standards

An anonymous reader writes "OOXML is already Microsoft's "de facto" standard as implemented in Office 2007, so when would any changes arising from the Comments Resolution meeting in February 2008 be put in place? According to Jeremy Allison's latest column, when last minute changes were suggested for the CIFS standard, which Samba exists to disentangle, "the response came back from Microsoft that although the fixes were valid, unfortunately the code was already written and was going to be shipped in the next service pack. End of discussion. It wasn't even in a shipping product yet, but the specification was determined to be unchangeable as they didn't want to change their existing code.""

Comments

Re:I must have missed something HUGE

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget bot-nets... Those are servers too.

Re:where is the problem?

[m2943]

In other words, to paraphrase Ballmer, Microsoft could submit a ham and cheese sandwich for ratifcation, and it would be approved.

That sounds like a much better standard than OOXML, and it's much easier to implement for everybody. And if Microsoft tries to sneak bits of a 10 year old ham and cheese sandwich in there, like they did with OOXML, people will know the second they bite into it.

Re:where is the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

> easier to implement for everybody

No. The standard would say:

To make an ISO standard Ham and Cheese Sandwich, make it like Bill Gate's mother used to.

Defy all challenges

[Big Nothing]

Ironically, when reading this article it is accompanied by a Microsoft ad proclaiming "Defy all challenges". A fitting motto, I suppose.