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Microsoft's Influence On Upcoming ISO Vote
christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft has experienced some criticism for its handling of its bid to have OOXML accepted as an ISO standard, including the use of financial incentives to affect the Swedish national vote, which resulted in Sweden reversing its pro-Microsoft position; and failing to honor a promise to relinquish control of the OOXML specification if it gained ISO status. A few days ago Groklaw published an article that raises questions about Microsoft's influence on the upcoming February vote, citing concerns with the limitation of discussions of patent issues, public accountability of the process, and even irregularities with choosing the size of the room so as to limit the delegates opposed to OOXML ISO status, as had been done in the past."
What's next? Will Microsoft try to bribe OpenOffice.org to make OOXML the new default file format? Will they attempt to make Microsoft Bob an ISO standard? Will they try to release a document specification that has four different definitions of a "percent"?
Oh, wait... they are already doing that last one.
Tomato wedge sperm darts that are Republican.
NB is a national body... the one from each nation that gets a vote at the ISO.
BRM is the ballot resolution meeting... it's where all the nations get together and finalize the changes upon the document and then they go home to their respective countries and they decide whether they'll change their vote.
So what this means in english is that anyone with copyright/patent/trademark/business-process problems should take that up outside the BRM because the BRM is only about the wording of the document.
It's advising national bodies to take this up with the ITTF, which many of them are doing.
I agree with you WRT basic office documents.
:-(
Many companies (especially state/county) use scanning tech to save millions of docs that are NOT saved in MS format.
I recently worked for a company that did document scanning work. The core product scanned in a lot more PDF and non-MS Office documents, than MS Office Word documents.
With that being said, yes, I agree with you, far too many U.S business use the standard MS Office format. Which means they are locked-in to MS-Only crap for a long, long time.
"Nearly every document stored by every business in the world is stored in Microsoft formats at this point."
Well I wasn't sure what to do with my mod points, but I just had to reply to this one. The Microsoft format, while very popular, is not "the" format for all and every business. I know many of private business and government agencies just in my area alone that use Open Office to store all documents. Converting to Microsoft word when someone just has to have it in that format. I've helped many more convert to some kind of Open Office or the likes format for many business. Business don't care what format it is, as long as it's portable and best of all is cheap (or free). I don't know how many IT admins have thank me for clearing up the tremendous trash that Microsoft builds up in their files to make a simple one page letter eat 10 times more space than an Open Office document of the exact same text on their file servers. It's nice to see letters and spreadsheets that don't eat up so much space for so little data inside (at least the data that the business cares about anyway).
So yeah, it's popular, but the world certainly not 100% all Microsoft documents.
The problem of inactive members occurred in subcommittee 34 (SC34) of the joint technical committee between ISO and IEC (JTC1). It never affected all of ISO, and several specifications have been approved as standards by ISO since then. The problem still prevents SC34 from getting anything done.
ISO has many committees, and most of them contain several subcommittees. SC34 of JTC1 is only one subcommittee among many. Many people think the problem of inactive members affects all of ISO, but it actually only affects a small part of ISO, and IEC is just as affected as ISO is.
Microsoft has really hurt SC34 of JTC1, but ISO is far too large and important for comparatively puny Microsoft to screw over the entire thing.
Or perhaps it is because Europeans would like to migrate data away from Microsoft products, but require the APIs in order to be able to transition effectively?