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EU's Anti-Trust Investigation of OOXML Continues
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Since January, the EU has been investigating whether Microsoft broke anti-trust laws while advocating OOXML. That investigation continues following its passage as a standard. Meanwhile, the ISO approval of OOXML is being appealed, so Microsoft hasn't won just yet."
Am I the only one who is experiencing cramped comments? About 1/5 of the page is just a margin.
Summation 2
Well I don't read that an appeal has been filed yet.
But it will be.
To not appeal as this point is tantamount to agreeing to the decision to make it a standard. It is demonstrable that a great many people, companies and organizations do not agree (in fairly strong terms) as we can assume an appeal is inevitable.
At this point, an appeal makes a stand and casts doubt on OOXML as a standard - so win or lose in the appeal, the mere fact that there is one will help our case.
Lastly, I state again - if OOXML passed the agreed consultations and tests for a standard, was approved in the conventional standard, and brought a demonstrably superior implementation to ODF then I would accept it in a heartbeat.
The OOXML Standard was bought and the ISO stood idly by, hand extended.
Therefore the ISO is now irrelevant; so who cares about the ISO.
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Yes, but who has standing to file an appeal here? TFA says ISO national bodies. That would be a pretty difficult challenge to mount.
As with the Netscape use of the justice dept to go after Microsoft, I remain very unimpressed by companies that attempt to win commercial battles by involving government. Netscape did not help the anti-trust case against Microsoft, on the contrary, they caused the DoJ to abandon a strong case (on the pricing issue) into a weak one. Netscape's tactics against Spyglass were every bit as aggressive and anti-competitive as those they accused Microsoft of. Netscape was never a good player in the standards world either, they wanted absolute control of the Web. Their idea of standards participation was to fax a proposed 'standard' to W3C hours before they released the product.
The risk here is that the EU is going to look at this from a protectionist point of view. They have an opportunity to establish some non-tarrif trade barriers here and there is little opportunity for the US to complain.
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It seems to me that it doesn't matter in the least if OOXML becomes a standard -- because frankly, nobody but Microsoft is going to put any significant effort into supporting it. A "standard" which is only supported by one product is about as useful as a two inch long drinking straw in a world of six inch tall soda cans... what's the point in even worrying about it?
Another example of this same problem is the Acid3 browser test. While I applaud the guys who came up with the tests for pointing out how many "standards" have been ignored by modern browsers, and I am quite impressed with the folks developing Opera and Safari/Webkit for their efforts to meet those standards... it still won't genuinely mean much until the forty foot gorilla in the room (Microsoft's Internet Explorer, of course) decides to play nice too.
In the case of Acid3, this is a regrettable fact of life that actually works to Microsoft's advantage -- which is why they aren't chomping at the bit to actually fix their browser. In the case of OOXML... Microsoft probably doesn't realize it yet, but they're pretty much screwed no matter how this thing ends.
Two wrongs do not make a right, and if IBM and other companies were wrong as he suggest, then so was Microsoft if they did the same, and it just goes to support the argument that the process was tampered with and the results discarded. By making that statement, he actually argued against his own position that everything went fine.
Note: I work for IBM, but this opinion is my own
Microsoft did this to discredit ISO. Think about it, Microsoft sabotages the voting process and everyone "inconviniently" discovers the voting fraud. As a consequence ISO isn't trusted anymore.
What happens? Everyone scrambles to consolidate "their" (read: Microsoft's) idea of standard. "Unfortunately" this will mean that each and every standard breakable by Microsoft will be broken in such a way that it's very convenient for... Microsoft.
Microsoft is pushing OOXML simply to sabotage ISO and not to provide a "competitor" to ODF, that's only the front.
At this point criminal prosecution of the Microsoft execs responsible for this would be very desirable (corruption, fraud and forgery of documents (yes, it might just apply here)).
The companies aiding Microsoft in the irregularities deserve to get punished severely over this.
As it stands, the new OOXML 'standard' amounts to a mandate to upgrade to Office 2007 (yes, there's some kind of add-on for older versions, but most will just eat the upgrade). A nice win for MS.
It would be nice if Government mandates required that multiple, compatible implementations exist for whatever standards they mandate.
That might call Microsoft's bluff. Either they'd have to implement a working OOXML to ODF translator or help others implement OOXML and verify completeness.
Hell, by defining 'standard' in terms of actual multiple implementations, Office 2000 binary would make a better standard than OOXML. OOo does a pretty good job of reading them - better than anybody but MS is likely to do for OOXML anytime soon.
So, let's lobby for governments to just standdardize on ODF, PDF and Office 2000.
Of course, Abiword, KOffice and OOo would have to get cracking on making their ODF implementations compatible for ODF to make the cut.
Any guesses which job would be easier?
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
... handcuffing customers to MS Office is the source of their income and power. All else (windows monopoly, etc) follows.<rant>Which just sucks golfballs. I recently installed Office 2008 for the Mac. Universal binaries and all, made me expect improvements. Silly me - what a stinking pile of dog poop! As slow as the f*cking runtime-translated powerpc-binary-2004, buggy to no end (ate several files already, while I'm on a hard deadline), the interface has been changed where it makes no sense (the templates etc drop-down section) - but unchanged where it should have been fixed (native scroll bars in most controls). ARRRGH!!
I actually tried to build OOo so that I could try to fix the handling of tables in headers/footers (which is the main show-stopper for our company for using OOo). Too bad the mac native version isn't up to snuff yet (in too many ways for someone to just quickly fix)./rant>
But one does have to hand it to Microsoft. Well played.
I dont really care what happens with the legal side of this, it doesnt matter how many times microsoft get caught with its trousers down, the uninformed masses just dont care (or worse say that its what you do when you have a monopoly? )
What i do want to see, is microsoft having thier asses handed to them on the technological side. With gnome office onboard there is a real chance that microsoft isnt going to have the best implimentation of thier own standard, its much harder to take a finished product and tweak it to conform to the new OOXML changes (without breaking anything), than it is to start from scratch and design a fully OOXML complient (when theres nothing to break). If the gnome team get OOXML implimented well, a small unix style aplication could easily allow convertion between OOXML and ODF ( go crazy and call it OOXML2ODF., Simply install it into the OS, and allow ODF complient programs to use OOXML programs without even relising and visa-versa, this would kill the document office suite link which is microsofts main weapon.
The problem is everybody is too busy bitching about OOXML to realise that MS have given us a chace to beat them on thier home turf.
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