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OOXML Rumored to be Approved, Announcement Wednesday
dominux writes "Rumors are already circulating that Microsoft's OOXML has been voted in by the standards board. The Open Sourcerer claims to have results of the ballot on dis29500. According to the site Microsoft managed to flip enough countries to make it stick. 75% of the P members who didn't abstain voted for Microsoft (That is 58% of all the P members). 14% of all the P and O members voted to disapprove it, this includes all the new O members that joined just in time to cast their vote. Norway has asked that their vote be suspended due to voting irregularities, but it would take more than that to make a difference to the result. ZDNet is still playing it cautious, noting that an announcement either way is set to be made on Wednesday."
Microsoft has performed a valuable service without really meaning to.
By demonstrating once and for all how embarassingly corruptible the ISO is, it calls into doubt the validity of many past and future ISO standards, and will force us into a proper re-evaluation of self-appointed standards bodies and the standards they whore around.
For too long we've taken the rather naive view that being an 'open standard' is enough. At last we see the foolishness of that view.
And in this case, I think it's somewhat unfair to judge Microsoft too harshly for wanting to game the system any way they could- what company wouldn't have done in their position?
But it is to ISO's massive, disgusting and probably reputation-destroying shame they they simply laid back and allowed themselves to be corrupted, defiled and sodomised by a large multinational. And they didn't even get a kiss afterwards.
I hope everyone who played their part in this sordid venture has plenty of time to repent at leisure when they realise that the ISO can never, WILL never, be trusted again.
I am hoping one or two countries stand up and say that how this standard was passed shows that all ISO standards are worthless.
With dozens of countries reporting massive voting problems they had better not pass it, or at least switch those countries from yes to abstain until future reference. Norway had the majority vote againist the standard but still voted yes, Poland, germany, France all had voting irregularities. I hope the EU launches an Anti-trust investigation into MSFT's business practices on it. that would be so much fun to watch.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
75% of the P members who didn't abstain voted for Microsoft (That is 58% of all the P members).
14% of all the P and O members voted to disapprove it,
this includes all the new O members that joined just in time to cast their vote
75% of the P members voted in favor of the standard. This is 58% of the entire P group.
So a solid majority of P members voted in favor.
Only 14% of all members voted against.
New O members who voted all joined specifically to vote against it.
The last item seems to be the real voting irregularity. A lot like how a bunch of Texas Republicans turned blue just to vote against Obama and hand the win to Clinton.
It's not just those who voted for the standard that should be admonished, but thsoe coutnries who knew it was a wrong and corrupt process and yet still abstained!
To extend the oft-used rape analogy in the discussions on this topic, these are the bystanders who stood and watched while the rape occured.
I think we need a new icon for ISO stories...a spineless jelly fish might be appropriate...
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
Whether or not the opensourcerer is right (though the numbers seem to correspond with those of openmalaysiablog), I think we have to brace ourselves for the worst. Even with Norway having its vote suspended, that wouldn't be enough, and now Trinidad and Tobago and Slovenia (both P-members) seem to have changed from abstaining to approving, which severly diminishes any hope of getting the whole thing tossed out.
:)
I seriously like your idea of calling it the "Fools Standard", though. Let's hope we never have to use the term, but if we do, let's at least hope you've created a new meme
All I can I say "who cares?".
..... err... what else reads ooxml? oh thats right nothing, we'll have to wait for office 2010"... Or even better (assuming what most people are saying is correct about ms word not even saving according to the standard). "wow, KOffice just realised their OOXML plugin, lets take a look - hmmm, this looks nothing like what i saved, and documents i saved in OOXML format in Koffice dont look right in MS Word either" (or even better, "but documents i saved in KOffice do look right in MS word"). The response "we coded our plugin according to the ISO standard", but of course, then everyone else codes according to the standard and the only one that looks wrong is MS Office - not a compelling argument for MS office is it?
I know next to nothing about how iso standards go, and I suspect there are many people out there making comment (the vast majority) that know about as much as I do.
In all likely hood the guys at ISO central are sitting there laughing at each other going "hahahha, the IT crowd really got their knickers in a knot over this? they think this one was irregular, they should have seen ISO9004!". But they most likely have their hands fairly well tied too, the votes are in and they probably cant do much about the (supposedly) obvious corruption of the process.. or can they? What power do they have? I certainly don't know myself...
But look at it from another angle, what does it really mean? The whole purpose of standardizing the format (as i understand it) was so that documents could be accessed at any point in the future (and by other applications) without loosing their content and formatting. How does OOXML achieve this in reality? how do you test that theory? With ODF at least you can say, "ok, i just saved a document in ODF from MS word using sun's plugin and opened it up in Sun Star office - wow it prints and looks the same", but thats not case closed because you need to try that again in 10 years and confirm the theory. Try that again with OOXML - "ok, i just saved an OOXML from ms word, now lets open it up in
In a way, MS could very well shoot themselves in the foot if they have 10 other office product vendors with the same ooxml implementation that looks wrong only in MS office...
Another thing to consider - Would OOXML being a standard kill ODF? No, ODF still exists and in reality alot of people round the world are already using it - ironically they're probably mostly using it from MS Office anyway because of Sun's ODF plugin. Which brings me to the next point, if OOXML wasn't a standard does it release the strangehold of MS office? no, Sun did all the dirty work providing ODF import/export for MS office already.
The only real problem that exists is when governments of the world (who fell into the trap of ooxml) realize that the MS Office written OOXML documents will only ever open again in MS office properly (hi, welcome to vendor lock-in, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride - oh and by the way, office 2010's OOXML implementation will be slighly different, so hang onto the old hardware cause your going to need it so you can keep office 2007 around). At the end of the day it just gives various bodies the world over a comfy feeling they can stick with MS office anyway and save in its native format (and perhaps point fingers at someone else when it goes wrong). When it comes to "oh, KOffice cant open OOXML the same way MS can", KOffice will get blamed but thats why MS have tonnes of money for pulling off stunts like this no?
Obviously im ignoring things like third party applications that dont open documents for word processing, but things like Google Search appliance wont record documents with a proper formatting and thus MS search will look "right" - and again, this will benefit MS (and there will be many applications in many field that will probably suffer something because of it).
Maybe the EU should have taken MS's 3.1bil and bought their own votes on the ISO committee's just for a bit of poetic justice (or
>75% of the P members voted in favor of the standard. This is 58% of the entire P group.
At least one memeber of the P group did not vote at all, so the 58% is not completely accurate.
>New O members who voted all joined specifically to vote against it.
The only O members that voted "Not Approved" were Brazil and Cuba. Were they both new? In any case, they were hardly that many. There were on the other hand 37 O members that voted "Approve". Are you saying none of them joined recently?
OOXML set for approval with China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Canada disapproving?
People, we're talking more than half the world's population, a very large geographical area, and bellwether countries in their continents.
If Azerbaijan's vote has the same weight as any of the above, then the ISO process is a big joke.
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