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Microsoft Joins OpenDocument Alliance 256

Posted by Zonk from the hey-no-one-invited-me dept.
Jim writes "Microsoft has joined a committee that has a key role in the ratification of OpenDocument as an international standard, leading to accusations that it intends to sabotage the process. Microsoft has denied this accusation, claiming that the only reason why Microsoft employee Jim Thatcher has joined the group was to get involved in the ISO standardisation of its own file format." From the article: "'There sits Microsoft, waiting, like a spider,' wrote Jones, in a posting on her site. 'I am imagining ODF plodding along, with Microsoft asking questions, fine-combing through the comments, did you mean this or that?, getting bogged down in minutia until, lo and behold, either Microsoft's XML makes it as an ISO standard first, or they arrive neck and neck.'" More information here on a subject we touched on in a recent Slashback. update a few readers have asked for the clarification that MSFT has not joined ODF, but rather the "INCITS/V1 Technical Committee"
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Microsoft Joins OpenDocument Alliance More

Microsoft Joins OpenDocument Alliance

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  • eerily familiar (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) * <yayagu@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:29PM (#15011664) Journal

    I don't know if Microsoft's motivation is sabotage by joining ODF, but from the article, an eerily familiar description:

    "There sits Microsoft, waiting, like a spider," wrote Jones (Pamela), in a posting on her site. "I am imagining ODF plodding along, with Microsoft asking questions, fine-combing through the comments, 'did you mean this or that?', getting bogged down in minutia until, lo and behold, either Microsoft's XML makes it as an ISO standard first, or they arrive neck and neck."
    (BTW, isn't there a Donovan song about Pamela Jones?)

    Ahem, back to the topic... I worked on a group from our company and Microsoft on an e-commerce soon-to-be-standard (related to xml), and Microsoft's attitude, performance, and etiquette was embarrassing, annoying, and unprofessional. Aside from the unsurprising Microsoft employees' strong-arming the agenda, it was clear they had no affinity or appetite for any of our ideas. It was also equally clear that their intent was the final result would be their way or the highway.

    Also, having worked briefly at Microsoft, the description resonates with the "triage" meetings at Microsoft -- at the time, the hot topic was IBM's MCA bus architecture, and ideas to make sure it would not be important in the emerging PC technology.

    Superficially, it may be a good thing having Microsoft join ODF, but I wouldn't let them bring in or take out any pencils, paper, or recording devices of any kind of the meetings. Just my hunch, I don't trust them.

    • Re:eerily familiar (Score:2, Insightful)

      by toleraen ( 831634 )
      I dont' see any added information than what was already on the slashback. Just total speculation. Not that I'm terribly pro-MS, but come on! They both need ISO approval, and they both go through the same committee. Microsoft is one company. TFA states there are several others. If MS, as one company, tries to block ODF, then what do you think the other companies will do? Granted MS is a large company, but I can't imagine it'd be terribly difficult to find things for the other companies to gripe about

      • Re:eerily familiar (Score:5, Interesting)

        by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:33PM (#15011696) Journal
        We all know where this is going. We've been down the road before.

        I'm beginning to think that an adequate punishment for Microsoft's monopolistic practices would be to forbid them to submit any standards, sit on any standards committee or have anything to do with drafting of standards. It's punitive and it would fuck up one of the big ways in which MS has been able to screw the industry.
        • Microsoft never have had much to do with standards, other than to completely ignore them and create their own stuff regardless.
          • They intentionally pervert the standards. See Kerberos as an example. They have to know what the standards are to screw things up so royally.
            • Kerberos comes to mind as being one of the most notorious instances, and in this case, it's a good example of why forbidding Microsoft to submit standards, forcing Microsoft to have to be fully compliant with recognized standards and forbidding them the ability to "extend" standards would ultimately benefit the industry and the consumer. Let's be blunt, when it comes to standards, Microsoft is evil.

            • Re:They don't ignore standards (Score:4, Funny)

              by laughing rabbit ( 216615 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @02:28PM (#15012089)
              Also, see Windows TCP/IP implementation in Win95/98. Working as an ISP call center tech during it's reign of terror was fun.

              "You can connect OK but can't get any web sites?

              Tries pinging

              DNS is hosed

              "OK now, open network properties. See TCP/IP? Delete it. Go ahead and delete everything in this window. Click OK all the way back out. Now restart when Windows asks you to. If it doesn't, restart anyway."

              Minutes pass

              "OK now, let's go back to network properties and readd TCP/IP. Windows is asking for the CD? Just put it in the drive---you don't have the CD? I'm sorry, I'm sure that I asked you that before we started. Be sure and call back when you find your CD, OK? Bye now"

          • Re:eerily familiar (Score:5, Informative)

            by Karzz1 ( 306015 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @02:17PM (#15012009) Homepage
            "Microsoft never have had much to do with standards, other than to completely ignore them and create their own stuff regardless."

            I am not so sure about that. They made a fine [newsforge.com] friggin mess [messagingpipeline.com] of the SPF [openspf.org] standard by introducing patents on several key parts of the standard while delaying and filibustering until the IETF working group (MARID [circleid.com]) became defunct as a result. I am sure I could find other examples of MS strong-arming, delaying, and otherwise being a general pain in the ass to standards bodies.
        • They are completely incorrigible. They have shown this time and time again. The only thing that can stop them would be death or something similar like being broken into smaller parts. They will attempt to use their considerable size, influence, money, anything to do what they call 'competing.' Well, anything except make a BETTER product. Better is bad. Once people buy the better stuff, they won't want to upgrade.

    • Re:eerily familiar (Score:4, Informative)

      by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:36PM (#15011716)
      ...joining ODF...Microsoft join ODF...
      Nobody can "join ODF". It's a physical impossibility. ODF is a format. You can't join ODF any more than you can join RTF, CSV, etc. Microsoft could join the OpenDocument Alliance (ODA), perhaps. But they have little interest in doing so. And they haven't. They've joined INCITS. It's a technical committee that steers the ISO adoption process. Joining ODA would mean they support ODF. Joining INCITS can mean any number of things...most likely that they want to slow down ODF ratification as an ISO standard. Any other reason they give has about as much truth in it as "Read my lips...no new taxes."

    • Can you say OpenGL ARB? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by saha ( 615847 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:40PM (#15011746)
      Microsoft managed to stall OpenGL 2.0 and other improvements for the longest time by claiming potential patent infringements with its vertex and pixel shader technologies. As a result OpenGL stalled for some time. Microsoft has since left the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) after doing the damage it needed to do. Deja vu.
    • (BTW, isn't there a Donovan song about Pamela Jones?)

      I think you're thinking of Pamela Jo [lyricsdownload.com], not that I'm a big Donovan fan or anything.

      But Microsoft isn't joing the ODA, they're joining the ISO group that's responsible for ODF's ISO certification.

      Interestingly enough, despite Microsoft's protests to the contrary, as the person who is quoted in the article (Groklaw's PJ) has stated on her site [groklaw.net], the specific committee on which Microsoft sits just happens to be the one that's responsible for tallying up all the

    • Re:eerily familiar (Score:5, Funny)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @02:10PM (#15011965) Homepage Journal

      Dr. Weird: GENTLEMEN! I give you - MORE STANDARDS MICROSOFT IS INVOLVED WITH!

      Assistant: Well, gee, I dunno, last time...

      Dr. Weird: THIS TIME WILL BE DIFFERENT!

      Assistant: Well, OK, we could use Microsoft's support after all, and -

      Microsoft starts adding in .Net components and ActiveX controls

      Assistant: AEEEIEEE!!

      Dr. Weird: It's not different at all, is it, Steve?!

      Ballmer: Steve smash! Throws a chair at the assistant

      Dr. Weird & Ballmer: Maniacal Laughter

    • Also, having worked briefly at Microsoft, the description resonates with the "triage" meetings at Microsoft -- at the time, the hot topic was IBM's MCA bus architecture, and ideas to make sure it would not be important in the emerging PC technology.


      Well, Microsoft didn't have to do anything about that since IBM wanted royalties for MCA and back royalties for ISA for anyone implementing the MCA bus.
    • "I am imagining ODF plodding along, with Microsoft asking questions, fine-combing through the comments, 'did you mean this or that?', getting bogged down in minutia ..."

      What's wrong with someone getting into minutia? If it's a spec shouldn't it be perfectly clear, no ambiguity, so that different impementors with compliant code will naturally interoperate?
    • but I wouldn't let them bring in or take out any pencils, paper, or recording devices of any kind of the meetings. Just my hunch, I don't trust them.

      you better make sure the chairs are bolted to the floor as well. just in case.

  • Imperial March (Score:3, Funny)

    by NETHED ( 258016 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:30PM (#15011679) Homepage
    Why did I hear the Imperial March when I read this story? Now MSFT will try to strong-arm the alliance into recognizing that MSWord is the only way.

  • Jesus Christ (Score:5, Informative)

    by killmenow ( 184444 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:31PM (#15011681)
    Could you PLEASE fix the headline?! Microsoft most definitely DID NOT JOIN the OpenDocument Alliance. ODA is the group who is trying to push for ODF adoption. Microsoft can join if they want, but they don't want.

    They joined the INCITS/V1 Technical Committee. They're not even remotely the same thing and don't even look remotely similar (ODA vs INCITS). Way to go on the asinine headline Zonk.

  • why would they sabotage it? (Score:5, Funny)

    by gEvil (beta) ( 945888 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:31PM (#15011682)
    I can't imagine why anyone would think that Microsoft would sabotage this project. After all, their past statements clearly show that they fully support it.
    • I can't imagine why anyone would think that Microsoft would sabotage this project. After all, their past statements clearly show that they fully embrace and extend it.

  • hmmm (Score:3, Informative)

    by celardore ( 844933 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:32PM (#15011686)
    I really can't see Microsoft ever sharing the 'office' market, using universal formats, with any other company but MS.

    PDF is more standard than .doc, in my business experience, for sharing documents intercompany.
    We're stuck with .xls for the forseeable future with spreadsheets though.

  • Not much to do (Score:2, Insightful)

    by archen ( 447353 )
    I'm not sure if it matters if the MS format becomes an ISO first or at the same time. The lines are already drawn. Every software group that produces word processing documents seems to either be using or at least supporting ODF. Who supports Microsoft's format aside from Microsoft? No one right now, and those who do support it will follow microsoft no matter what the outcome of all of this is anyway.

    If anything I'd say they put him there to observe the progression more than anything else.

    Or maybe I forgo

    • Re:Not much to do (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hal9000(jr) ( 316943 )
      Every software group that produces word processing documents seems to either be using or at least supporting ODF. Who supports Microsoft's format aside from Microsoft?

      Standard, schmandards. The real question is who's productivity software (word processing, spread sheets, etc) does business use? A related question is what are the *costs* to business of switching to ODF? I used to use WordPerfect (I have since version 4.1) but I got tired of file format conversions with co-workers (yes, I did need clean c
      • Ahem, Google. Think ODF export from Writely, from IBM's Workplace tools, from a Lotus email, from tax prep software, etc. All these players would love to have a standard not controlled by MS. If those products crowd out your use of Word, then the switching issue becomes much less relevant.
        • If it really got to that point, and ODF is really a standard (meaning that each program using it really writes a similar file), then when wouldn't Microsoft add ODF capabilites to Office?

          Then business users can keep using word and for people who are sending ODF documents they can still open the files from them.

          • Re:Not much to do (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Todd Knarr ( 15451 )

            Because one of Microsoft's big arguments in favor of sticking with MS software is the cost and hassle of converting all those Microsoft-format documents into the other software's formats. If customers don't have to convert documents, there's not much argument in favor of MS when license renewal comes up and Finance says "Why should we spend $BIGNUM on MSOffice licenses when we can spend $BIGNUM/10 on OpenOffice instead and be able to do everything we need?".

            This is the real reason Microsoft is worried abou

      • Re:Not much to do (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Hairy1 ( 180056 )
        The cost of switching for most people and organisations will be pretty low. Some organisations which do depend on complex macros and templates may have difficulty, but in my experience organisations implementing OpenOffice have faced very few implementation issues. Having other applications be able to modify documents has been the bane of my life prior to OO when it comes to document management. OpenOffice made document generation easy without needing to have server side Word instances.

        Often Office is used

      • The best part of a formal standard is that or you support it, or you don't. There is no middle ground, so if MS Office claims to support ODF, it must support it all, and only it (no embrace and extend).

      • The cost of switching to an ODF compliant file format should be a lot lower than the cost of switching to MS's XML format. Existing versions of Office (think 2000, 97, etc) don't read/write that format either.

        This is why I can't imagine MS every adopting ODF. If ODF documents could be read without loss into MS-Office and written without formatting loss by MS-Office then much of the world wouldn't buy MS-Office anymore. Free vs $300? $99 vs $300?

        I guess MS could lower their price on MS-Office but then th

  • FUD? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:38PM (#15011732) Journal
    FTA: ""In order for Jim to participate in the future Open XML File Format work he needs to have standing in JTC1 SC 34 [a committee that mirrors INCITS/V1] which mandates participation over time. His presence in this group will have no impact upon the voting process for the ODF standard. Just as we have a seat on the board of OASIS and have not participated in the ODF process there, we will not participate in the JTC1 process," said Jason Matusow, Microsoft's director of standards affairs, in a statement." (emphasis mine)

    Anyone have any info on whether MS has truly laid off with OASIS and the ODF process there? Not to say that non-interference there means non-interference with Open XML, but it's a start.

  • They'll fail (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kimvette ( 919543 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:46PM (#15011809) Homepage Journal
    ISO certification or not, true open standards are the wave of the future. Too many companies and people have gotten burned by vendor lock too many times, to the point where the movement toward open standards and open source here in Taxachusetts has attracted mainstream press, not just technical journalists. Perhaps ODF won't gain steam quite as quickly if it became an ISO-certified standard immediately, but with states' and commonwealths' accepting ODF as the document exchange and archival solution, it will quickly filter down to education, state vendors (who want to keep their contracts) and law offices, and from there trickle down to everyone else. Small companies will quickly learn "Oh, I DON'T have to plunk down $450 for Microsoft Office any more? Where do I get this OpenOffice?"

    • ISO certification or not, true open standards are the wave of the future. Too many companies and people have gotten burned by vendor lock too many times, to the point where the movement toward open standards and open source here in Taxachusetts has attracted mainstream press, not just technical journalists.

      Most of whom wouldn't know a truly open standard from an industry con-job if they sat on one. We used to have this problem with poor business processes, and now we have ISO 9000 and Tick-It, which don

    • "Small companies will quickly learn "Oh, I DON'T have to plunk down $450 for Microsoft Office any more? Where do I get this OpenOffice?""

      Until their staff bitches about having to learn new software. Small companies have huge problems with training staff to use new software... hence the reason my company still pays for Lotus, since there are two employees who refuse to learn Excel. Moving over to OO would cause conniption fits and too big a disruption of business.

  • Screwed if you do, screwed if you don't (Score:4, Insightful)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:47PM (#15011818) Homepage Journal
    If MS doesn't join the alliance, they're seen as factious and self-serving.
    If MS joins the alliance, they're seen as sneaky, underhanded, factious and self-serving.

    • If MS doesn't join the alliance, they're seen as factious and self-serving.
      If MS joins the alliance, they're seen as sneaky, underhanded, factious and self-serving.

      If Hussein doesn't join the alliance, he's seen as factious and self-serving.
      If Hussein joins the alliance, he's seen as sneaky, underhanded, factious and self-serving.

      Maybe if you don't build up a reputation as a sneaky, underhanded, factious, self-serving, criminal, people won't suspect the worst of you all the time. If MS completely chan

    • If MS doesn't join the alliance, they're seen as factious and self-serving. If MS joins the alliance, they're seen as sneaky, underhanded, factious and self-serving.

      Yep. /.'rs, by and large, see MS as facetious, self-serving, and sometimes sneaky and underhanded... This is because by and large MS *is* facetious, self-serving, and sometimes sneaky and underhanded.

      Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I think we have very good historical reasons [wikipedia.org] for keeping a very, very wary and suspicious eye on MS's behaviors.

    • If MS doesn't join the alliance, they're seen as factious and self-serving.
      If MS joins the alliance, they're seen as sneaky, underhanded, factious and self-serving.

      So... you're saying I hate MS either way?

      I can live with that.
    • They joined the ISO committee which is working on making the ODF an ISO standard.

    • Here's some good reading for you (Score:5, Informative)

      by Vicegrip ( 82853 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @03:56PM (#15012791) Journal
      Right in this very discussion even!

      Microsoft managed to stall OpenGL 2.0 and other improvements for the longest time by claiming potential patent infringements with its vertex and pixel shader technologies. As a result OpenGL stalled for some time. Microsoft has since left the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) after doing the damage it needed to do. Deja vu.

      Quickly accused to be BS by an Anonymous Coward. [slashdot.org]

      but then another AC to the rescue with the smackdown. [slashdot.org]

      Honestly, do you really think Microsoft is interested in collaborating with a standard that threatens to deprecate the MS Office format? Is that what you seriously believe?
    • Yea, that's because of some bad blood between Microsoft and the user community (and the blood is bad for a good reason too -- it's all documented, just google for it... you can start with halloween memos). Microsoft can overcome that type of perception, but it will take some seriously positive action to do that, or else it would just take a very long time of non-antagonizing for the bad perception to wear off naturally.

      So yea, if you act like a dick to people, then no matter what you do one day later, you'
    • But they're already seen as the former. And the latter... huh. But hating Microsoft and all that aside, I want the ODF set to become the standard simply because files are half the size! Neither one touches .txt and both aren't going to be larger than your hard drive block size for the odd couple-page paper (a 16-page paper I've got in .odt is 19k), but it's still wasteful, especially considering bandwidth when you're emailing files. Those few kilobytes saved add up.

    • Re:Screwed if you do, screwed if you don't (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @05:54PM (#15013630) Homepage
      If MS doesn't join the alliance, they're seen as factious and self-serving.
      If MS joins the alliance, they're seen as sneaky, underhanded, factious and self-serving.

      I know! It's sooo unfair. I mean, seriously. The worst they've ever been found guilty of was abusing their monopoly position. And that has only happened in several countries. The other dozens of allegations, like those relating to their interference with past standards such as OpenGL and Kerberos, have never even been tried in a courtroom. These assumptions of ill intent are based on nothing more than Microsoft's chronic and well-documented behavior over the past ten or fifteen years. It's soooo unfair.
  • You can see the list of OASIS members here:

        http://www.oasis-open.org/about/ [oasis-open.org]

  • is this a joke? (Score:2, Informative)

    by towsonu2003 ( 928663 )
    MS in an open document group? I mean, I have to convert Word 2003 files to pdf (using OpenOffice) before sending it to employees who have Word 2000!

    This is just a badass joke, isn't it?

    • Re:is this a joke? (Score:5, Informative)

      by towsonu2003 ( 928663 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @02:01PM (#15011903)
      Overrated -1
      Overrated? Tell that to my boss, who has Word 2000 and can't open the brochures I prepare in word 2003 (same office building, bad IT). So I end up downloading Portable OpenOffice because I have no administrative right to install a pdf printer, open my Word doc in OOo, fix it, export to pdf, and send that... And I get overrated. peh!

  • Conspiracy theories too soon (Score:5, Insightful)

    by smallpaul ( 65919 ) <paul @ p r e s c o d . net> on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @01:59PM (#15011880)
    Guys: I am a member of the group that Microsoft joined, JTC1 SC34. This is a very broad group that encompasses SGML, XML, HyTime, topic maps, Font Interchange and ODF. As per Microsoft's claim, it would probably include Microsoft's formats when they show up at ISO.

    http://www.jtc1sc34.org/#scope [jtc1sc34.org]

    The Slashdot heading is VERY incorrect and biased against Microsoft.

    • Re:Conspiracy theories too soon (Score:5, Funny)

      by amliebsch ( 724858 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @02:05PM (#15011932) Journal
      The Slashdot heading is VERY incorrect and biased against Microsoft.

      Here? On Slashdot? I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!

    • Out of general interest, how many people are on that committee? This is being presented as if the very act of MS putting a representitive into the body means that they are exercising some sort of control over it, whereas in my (albeit limited) experience, such groups usually have people from a fair number of commercial entities in them (together with various non-commercial ones), so Microsoft's single member would be unlikely to have any notable influence on anything.

    • " Guys: I am a member of the group that Microsoft joined"

      Nice, can you explain, since you don't accept members whith problems with antitrust laws [incits.org], why was Microsoft accepted?

      Also, don't your group make decisions based on consensus, instead o majority? How do you think Microsoft (that assumed plublicaly to be against ODF) won't disturb the acceptance process?

      • That's not what the guideline say. They're designed to ensure that the body itself doesn't become a vehicel for violation of antitrust laws (i.e. in the course of the meetings, everybody decides "let's raise prices for our software and services by 20%"), which could endanger the body's existence.
    • Well, it is a Zonk article, which guarantees that it will be less accurate than The Onion.

  • Patent Disclosure? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SydShamino ( 547793 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @02:09PM (#15011952)
    Does this technical committee require full patent disclosure by all members? If so, might this help ODF by forcing Microsoft to state now if they have any patent claims on anything that makes it into the final standard?

    I'd hate to see Microsoft secretly steer the committee towards something that, five years later, they would shut down as a patent violation. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened *cough*Rambus*cough*.

  • Not a dupe (Score:2, Insightful)

    by k1980pc ( 942645 )
    Atleast I don't think so. I mean, you cant get more original than Microsoft Joins OpenDocument Alliance, can you?

    but seriously, what is the issue in whose format is the standard, as long as it is standard? The standard needs to be something easily defined, can be adhered to without loss in functionality and is extensible. If MS's XML satisfies that, good enough..just make sure balmer guy does not sabotage that once it becomes the standard
    • what is the issue in whose format is the standard, as long as it is standard?
      Several issues:
      1. The Microsoft format is patent encumbered
      2. The Microsoft format does not integrate well with other existing standards (e.g. SVG can seamlessly be used within ODF markup, the current version of MS OpenXML cannot do that, as it breaks their markup).
      3. The Microsoft format does not exist yet, while ODF has already been implemented in OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Abiword, and support is coming to Gnumeric as well. There

    • If you've looked at ODF and MSXML, you'll see why it matters which one's the standard. If you look at a comparison of ODF and MSXML [groklaw.net], you'll see the differences. You'll notice that the XHTML and ODF examples read like document mark-up: you have the recognizable text of the document and things like paragraph and italic marks occur at the obvious places. This makes it really easy to manipulate ODF via XSLT to turn it into other formats. MSXML, by contrast, reads like an XML encoding of the internal object repr

  • The government should either have forced MS to publish its DOS API in full back in 1983 so others could write competing operating systems to that API, or converted to a net present asset valuation tax base [geocities.com] but failing all that the move by MS to open standards is the first real indication that they actually believe their material about having all this power due to having the best software -- as opposed to having a natural monopoly. Good for them.

  • Microsoft is....... (Score:4, Funny)

    by mormop ( 415983 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @02:42PM (#15012191)
    A Cancer, eating away at open standards from the inside!!! A Cancer I tell ya!! They're like communists, No, Facists, No! MONKEY DANCERS!!!!!!!

    Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and foam at the mouth and throw some furniture.

  • Deja Vu - JAVA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AnalogDiehard ( 199128 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @02:51PM (#15012270)
    I remember M$ infiltrating some JAVA organization and then tried to derail the standard by releasing their own Windows-centric JAVA engine. Sun successfully sued them for breach of contract and the M$ JAVA engine was pulled off the market.

    There was some reluctance from members of that JAVA organization back then too, and their worst fears proved correct.

    Other examples of the same M$ infiltration method are out there and they earned a reputation that they cannot be trusted on a standards organization.

  • they will do like they always do (Score:5, Insightful)

    by josepha48 ( 13953 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2006 @03:08PM (#15012395) Journal
    They will help write the standard and then they will implement what they want out of it, and extend it to suit their needs.

    People, look at HTML, CSS, and various other web standards, MS has their name all over these standards and look at how IE implements them. MS does this with all standards, so why should this be any different.

    Mod this down if you wish, flame it, etc, but I'm right and you know it!

  • Oh man.. they posted this article 4 days early !!!
  • I went looking up Mr Thatchers background and it seems he has quite a background in tech. He worked at Novell from 95' til 2000 and wore a number of hats there but mostly it was related to Novells NDS product( software engineering/design, NDS SDK Dev design, and NDS training, etc ). Then he skipped on over to Redmond WA to join Microsoft to work on their NDS compatibility in MS Windows. But none of this really stands out as a REASON for Microsoft throwing him into the ODF fray. I did see that Mr Thatcher ha

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