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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."
This had better be an April Fool's joke.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
because nobody would believe it if it was made today.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
if this is approved we can safely assume ISO is corrupt.
So, ISO got an extremely high profile black eye in the credibility department from which it may never recover. Developers and purchasers who are not able to make their high-level decision makers realize that they shouldn't early-adopt OOXML despite this certification are going to end up being held responsible for the massive clusterfuck that eventuates. Information will become a lot harder to keep organized and accessible in countries that adopt this messy non-spec as a standard, and global productivity will shrink due to the ensuing chaos.
Thanks MS.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
Lets all vote that it's not fair to need to eat, then we can stop dealing with those messy farms.
Oh, wait... democracy doesn't override cold hard reality, does it. My bad.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
The Microsoft way
(tho' rather funny)
Seems here to stay;
Redmond has money!
Burma Shave
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
The claimed results of the ballot on dis29500 document looks like a blatant forgery to me. For example, the implied claim about the process having been managed by ISO/CS ("Central Secretariat") ist wrong; the process is managed by ISO/IEC ITTF ("Information Technology Task Force"). Also, there is no defined "Voting stage" of "enquiry" in the JTC1 directives, etc etc.
nuff said
So can we hope to see Microsoft dismantling it's various monopolistic positions in the near future (voluntarily). I look forward to it.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
Well a few points:
If this is an April fools joke it isn't funny.
If this is real and the (gasp) "standard" was approved, we should all start calling it the "Fools Standard" in everything we write, thus putting the proper "spin" on it.
I thought we celebrated that day, every day :)
Dear all,
as you all may be aware we are involved with the ISO/JTC1 SC34 work.
Please find the official results for the ISO vote for OOXML (DIS 29500).
Probably the impact on the adoption of ODF of the OOXML process will be
minimal, but surely there will be some interest from the public around this.
OOXML which was submitted by Microsoft to ECMA, and by ECMA to ISO, has
literally crawled through the needles eye. After a year of discussion
and repairs it still receives the very minimum of support. The BRM
convinced some yet unconvinced others, and counter votes from large
countries like China, India, Brazil, Canada, South Africa and Iran speak
volumes. This must be one of the worst results ever for a standard to
pass within ISO/JTC1 in years.
Appartently the chair from the Norwegian committe has filed a protest
against the national outcome. Although one vote would not make much
difference, others may follow.
Kind regards,
Michiel Leenaars
NLnet foundation
OpenDoc Society board
http://lists.opendocsociety.org/pipermail/members.announce/2008-April/000002.html
This whole OOXML ISO Standards thing was just an elaborate April Fool's Joke that Microsoft orchestrated. Man, they really had us going, didn't they?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Check it out: http://dot.kde.org/20080401/"
Unfortunately, it seems to be true.
I've been tracking this for the last few months, and it's clear that this was essentially a victory of corruption over merits.
What's being said now is that this will be a pyrrhic victory for Microsoft. Many will discredit this standard (even with the ISO stamp on it) because of the history of corruption that lead to its approval. Those who already disliked Microsoft will only hate it even more and become more vocal.
I hope this whole process served to show the world (once again) what "business as usual" means for Microsoft.
So when msft is caught red-handed, like in Norway, or Sweden, then that one particular vote is not counted. But it is assumed that everything else is just fine, in spite of dozen of irregularities?
That doesn't really seem fair to me. It seems like, if you cheat, then you either win, or at least break even. It's like saying that the penalty for shop-lifting is that you have to put the stuff you stold back.
In fact, it seems like, in the case of Norway, msft did better than break even. Instead of a "yes" msft rigged a "nothing" which is better for msft than a "no."
Considering the massive number of irregularities in the OOXML approval process, I think OOXML approval should be put on hold, until an investigation can be completed.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. If it's standardized, Microsoft might be motivated to finally come up with a product that actually implements the whole thing.
Unfortunately to Microsoft discrediting ISO would be a bonus. If there are no reliable standards bodies then it just wakens the position of people trying to argue the advantage of standards compliance. For MS the best outcome would be that people would say "standards mean nothing anyway", because the alternative to de facto standards are de jura - and Microsoft sets most of these.
Why?
All they have to do is implement more than everyone else, then change the "standard" so that others are not compatible.
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
I think 'abstain' refers to those who didn't want to offend Microsoft for commercial reasons, but could not in all conscience vote for the pile of shite that OOXML is.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
>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?
...DoinItLikeWord95DoesIt.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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