“Microsoft looks almost certain to have got its Office Open XML (OOXML) file format passed as an international standard but the ballot has been tarnished by accusations of voting irregularities,” Kelly Fiveash reports for Channel Register.
“There’s no official word as yet from the International Standards Organisation (ISO), the body responsible for overseeing the ballot, but according to many observers that have been closely following the process, Microsoft appears to have secured enough votes at its second time of trying,” Fiveash reports.
“However, a number of delegates from the 87 national standards groups have been loudly complaining about alleged heavy-handed tactics and misdeeds in the voting process,” Fiveash reports. “Groklaw reports grumbles coming out of Norway and Poland where claims of irregularities have been voiced and there’s been talk of very close votes in Croatia and Germany.”
Full article here.
Groklaw reports:
If Microsoft gets this OOXML format “approved”, it will be by irregularities in the voting, it seems. Here’s more on what happened in Germany and a report on what is being called a scandal in Norway. And another odd process in Croatia.
If you can read German, here’s the story on what happened there. For those who can’t, when they went to vote, they were not allowed to vote disapprove, so the choice was to approve or to abstain. It was a tie, 6:6, which means no consensus. So under the rules I’ve read, that would have meant that they should send a vote of Abstain.
But surprise, surprise!! A solution helpful to Microsoft: the representative from DIN decided to cast a vote, which isn’t the process. DIN isn’t supposed to vote, because it’s supposed to advise. But this, they rationalized, was a vote not about whether to accept OOXML on the basis of *technical* issues, but whether to accept the approval suggestion of the technical committee. So DIN voted to accept DIN’s suggestion. Hence Germany ends up in the Approve column. I know. No doubt there will be objections filed.
Norway’s at least as bad. Here’s an article from Norway, and the translation of the title of the article is, “Scandal in Standards Norway. I didn’t write that headline. They did. And here’s why. The article says there should be an investigation of the irregularities there, because while there were only two votes to approve, from Microsoft and a business partner, Statoilhydro, and all the others voted no, 21 votes, they approved anyway. Here’s how they shuffled the deck in Norway. So they put everyone out of the room, and Standards Norway, three people were left in the room, and they usurped the decision and made it their business to decide to approve anyway.
Unbelievable. If it was happening in only one country, you might think it was local difficulties. But when it happens in place after place, one can only conclude that Microsoft, although outnumbered in a fair vote, has sufficient clout behind the scenes to shove this format into the world’s mouth and hold its mouth closed by force until the world is compelled to swallow. Remember that Microsoft memo that surfaced in the Comes v. Microsoft litigation? The one about how to stack a panel discussion at conferences so it would be favorable to Microsoft? The key was to get to be the moderator.
One thing is certain. Unless ISO steps up and fixes this mess, it will lose the world’s respect, and rightly so. Either the rules mean something, or they don’t, but if they don’t standards don’t mean anything either.
Full article here.
I think MS told Apple that they would pull Office for Mac if they didn’t vote for their standard. Apple can only do so much.
Its simple folks. Urge Apple to support ODF in iWorks and abandon OOXML.
It sickens me that Apple sides with Microsoft on this kind of stuff.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/microsofts-great-besmirching
Figure out a way to force the default file format to NOT be the new one.
Do it now before it defaults. Then everyone will say, I can’t read your file; so you then got to buy the new MS office.
@Logan,
This seems quite plausible. I have owned two versions of MS Office/Mac: ’98 and X. I bought them mostly for work, and so that my wife could feel that documents that she created at home would always work with the outside Microsofted world. But, all the while I’ve avoided ever becoming dependent on Office or even just Word. These products are just not necessary, and it simply is not the issue that some Mac users who feel the pressure (mostly from employers) to use MS Office claim that it is.
There are already a couple of developers that are promising compatibility with OOXML, Mariner and NeoOffice I believe are saying that they will be supporting this next proprietary MS thing. There’s a little Mac word processor that already supports it – I think that’s called “Bean”. Anyway.
While I personally appreciate the fact that MS does have a Mac Business Unit, I look forward to a day when sales of Macs will be on the rise while sales of MS Office are sharply on the decline. People, all people, including Windows users, just need to make the choice to stop suckling at the tit of MS’s office products. Desktop users have gotten to the point where they just use it dogmatically, not because it’s actually necessary – and that includes a whole lot of Macintosh users.
Let’s not forget too that, what no one will say out loud, so far, on this site is that Apple and MS are partners. And a partnership with either Apple or MS is no trivial matter, I have no doubt that this partnership is fraught with mountains of fine and tiny print that neither company can completely ignore, especially at perceptually critical junctions like this ISO scandal.
More to the point, if Apple could be convinced by the consumers of its computer products, that we no longer want or need MS Office, then I don’t think that that part of the Apple/MS partnership alliance would continue very far into the future, and I don’t think that either company would lose much sleep over it either. The bottom line here, as always, is the choices that we continue to make as individuals and companies. We’re the ones that keep buying into the, can’t-live-without-it mentality that MS has been so successful at creating on global scale. It’s not real – It’s just a perception created by an admitted skillful corporation. It’s a perception that can be broken at any time by anyone – including Windows users. (Remember there are more than just a few Windows users that are beyond fed up with being locked into MS Office products too.)
We can live just fine without MS – We just have to decide to.
Doesn’t this make you ashamed to have ever bought Microsoft products?
I don’t think people understand exactly what is going on here.
OBill-Wan Kenobi sez: “Really, if OOXML gets ISO approval, who gives a rats ass? Let’s face it, MS Office is already the de facto standard for 99.99% of all business environments. It’s more pervasive than Windows, itself. And frankly, what the international community does is their problem…. There is a lesson to be learned from the Linux phenomenon: it doesn’t matter if you come up with something useable and freakin give it away – industry drives the marketplace. As long as corporations continue to buy into the Microsoft paradigm we are going to be forced to use MS Office, at least, some of the time. The only thing we can do is continue to use and support alternative office suits as well.”
Yes, but the point of defeating the Office Open XML scam is to allow the Open Doc format to remain THE single international document standard, as it currently is.
Why is this critical?
(1) The Open Doc standard is truly OPEN. Despite the lies by Microsoft, ‘Office Open XML’ is based on proprietary Microsoft code. And the code is so complicated and convoluted that it would take a genius to understand it and use it as a standard in their own application. It has already been done. But I know the developer who did it, and it cost his company an enormous amount of money to do it thanks to the time required to figure it out. Shameful.
(2) The Open Doc standard is the basis of Open Office, the free Open Source competitor with Microsoft. This is the biggest boon to the Open Source effort ever. There is simply no way for Microsoft to compete with Open Source. This is currently the very best method of kicking Microsoft off their monopoly pedestal.
(3) The less Microsoft in the computer industry the better the future of computer innovation. Microsoft is the rope strangling the computer community. Open Source is the knife that’s cutting the rope.
(4) Keeping Open Doc as the sole international document standard FORCES Microsoft to support it in their Office Suite software. Otherwise, if ‘Office Open XML’ is made /another/ ‘standard’ then obviously Microsoft are going to entirely ignore the Open Doc standard, kicking Open Source in the junk. Ouch! And we’d be right back to where we were before Open Doc was invented. That’s how Microsoft destroys progress in computer technology. Getting the clue yet kids?
(5) Sanity says: There should be one, and only one international document standard. Two standards? What’s the point?