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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.""
"My own favorites were Cuba voting "yes" to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan's "yes" vote, even though OOXML as defined isn't able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language."
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The number of servers metric is close to useless anyway. We have nearly 500 exchange servers plus another 200 domain controllers (100k employees worldwide) and only one Linux machine... However, the Linux system is on three of the most expensive pieces of hardware you can even imagine, backed up by an immense SAN, and serves apps and data to every user in the company concurrently.
Long ago, anyone could claim to be a doctor... eventually the government and other bodies stepped in and started requiring standards. Not so long ago, the same thing happened to dentistry. Similar things happened to architects, electricians, plumbers and many other professions that shape the quality of life, existence and industry in the modern world. Oddly, we have yet to establish such standards in software and information technology and yet it is precisely software and information technology that virtually every aspect of life in the modern world heavily depend on.
There have been many disasters caused by bad code, bugs or other glitches in systems and yet for some reason it's more important that development costs are saved by using crappy programmers with crappy programming practices. Thousands of people will have to suffer and die before things will change I guess... that's what it took for all those listed above.