Microsoft Standing Firm On OOXML ISO Vote

christian.einfeldt writes "Microsoft has responded via the industry trade group ECMA to some of the thousands of criticisms of its submission of Office Open XML as an ISO standard. Open standards advocate Russell Ossendryver takes a look at those responses to see if Microsoft has made significant changes in either the substance of OOXML or the manner in which the OOXML specification will be maintained going forward. Ossendryver concludes that Microsoft's position has not significantly changed, but only hardened in place in advance of the Ballot Resolution Meeting which is to occur from February 25 through 29 in Geneva. While no one can say for certain whether Microsoft will succeed in having OOXML win the nod from the international community, Ossendryer thinks that Microsoft's firm stance is likely to backfire."

Here's for holding onto hope

[peragrin]

MSFT has so badly screwed up ISO, I can see many parties who were going to vote yes to change it into No.

directly because of MSFT the ISO has done nothing but stumble around they can't get the majorities that they need in oder to pass standards. Everything is stagnate. Here's to hope that MSFT gamed the system so hard that it blows up in MSFT's face.

Microsoft's Latest Trick

[Anonymous Coward]

And here's their latest trick: sending all the JTC1 NB's a poorly-researched, demonstrably inaccurate study [robweir.com].

Re:well...

[charlieman]

What's funny is not everybody can access the standards. ISO sells most of the standards documentation. Around 100$ for a pdf of something that should be open for everyone? come on!

Re:well...

[cp.tar]

Which OOXML most certainly isn't. There's real doubts that even Microsoft could implement it as it currently stands.

It's a scam, pure and simple.

So what do we do?

That's right: whenever you receive a .docx, .xlsx and other .*x documents, send them back, asking that they be converted into a readable format.
Include a link for Sun's ODF plugin for MS Office, if need be.

Fight fire with fire.

Re:well...

[MightyMartian]

Well, the reality is that I've had to install the compatibility pack on our Office 2003 installs. Ironically, most of this is not coming from business contacts, but from people writing from their home PCs with Office 2007 installed. As much as I'd love to tell my coworkers to send back messages saying "Save in Word 2003 format" the reality is that it's my job to make things work, so here comes the compatibility pack, the ultimate admission that whatever the ISO does or doesn't do, in the short-term, at least, we're stuck with Redmond's whims and machinations.

Re:Australia has been entirely corrupted by Micros

[Anonymous Coward]

No links, this isn't yet public -- Rick Jelliffe (an Ecma employee) is going with a junior person in Standards Australia to the Ballot Resolution Meeting.

Start making calls, Aussie.

Re:"Win the nod"?

[rifter]

"However, ISO has the same idiotic notion as the UN that all countries are equal"

Got any better ideas? Population? Oh yeah, letting China and India take 1/3 of the votes is a great idea. Democracy? Well, first, you have to define democracy.

This depends on whether you are talking about the ISO or the UN. But with respect to the UN I do think that it would make sense to create a parallel organization that only admits democracies and gives votes based on population. Maybe certain measures would require a given country's delegates (who would be elected) to submit the question to a ballot in their home country. It would take time to work out details, and yeah defining democracy would take awhile (look how long it took them to define a table at the Paris peace talks, or define peace at the Camp David accords) but it would be interesting. The most immediate effect would be that with a lot of world problems being decided in a body that ONLY allows democracies, it would put pressure on other countries to comply with that definition. After all the same countries that started the UN would be in that club right from the start (No not China and probably not Russia. But pretty much all of Europe, a lot of the western hemisphere, Japan, and a whole lot of other important countries).

Personally I think the UN has proven itself almost as useless as the League of Nations. We (the US) should still participate, but it's become mired in its own faulty institutions. It seems incapable as a body of preventing war or solving conflicts in any other way than war (which was the point of creating the UN in the first place). The members are to blame, but the system itself will need serious hacking to fix the problems that allow the members to muck it up in the first place.

Re:"Win the nod"?

[Citizen of Earth]

Population? Oh yeah, letting China and India take 1/3 of the votes is a great idea. Democracy? Well, first, you have to define democracy.

For ISO, I would say that a formula that combines GDP with per-capita GDP would give a good measure of who the real industrial innovators and players are. China has a high GDP but a low per-capita GDP. It has massive internal corruption, but it is still a global player. Per-capita GDP provides a good measure of corruption, since corruptions syphons it off.

Re:Apple isn't proprieta- NO WAIT !

[mcrbids]

> Yeah Apple is so open and this is the reason i can run OS X on my beige bo- OH WAIT I CANNOT !

Actually you can. There are a bunch of sites explaining how; that is much more useful than running XP on the new Intel Macs, which you can also do.

Yeah, you can get it running. If you don't care about security updates. If you take full responsibility for driver problems. If you don't mind dickering with your computer for a day or two. I never could get it to work under either VMWare Player or VMWare Workstation.

> But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !

You have to convert them first; you can do that in Itunes.

Great. Another hack. Wouldn't it be nice if you didn't have to download software of questionable legality? Feeling that Apple love, yet?

Neither am I.

> Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !

It works with wine apparently, or Crossover Office.

I'm noticing a pattern, here... Wine is a barely acceptable hackaround of the proprietary Win32 API. Wouldn't it be nice if iTunes actually worked... on Linux!?!?