Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 01:15 PM PDT

Do you suppose Microsoft is in it for the money or the recognition?
You expected honesty and morality from Microsoft?
With all due respect, climb back on your turnip truck.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 01:33 PM PDT

To hang on to its credibility, the only decision ISO can make at this point is to push the voting at least 6 months to investigate all this suspicious activities going on everywhere. Other than a delay or "NO" vote with comments, ISO is never looked at as respectful as it has been.
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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 01:45 PM PDT

Having just read about the Sweden vote, a scene from the West Wing came to mind. Josh is discussing gun control with a guy who has put his name to a quote on an about-to-be-published book. The guy advocates a very novel approach:
"See one thing I have never understood. There are about 2 million members of the NRA in the US. Why cant the gun control lobby get 3 million like minded people together, join the NRA then all vote to disband it."
(Not the correct phrasing but you get the idea)

It seems M$ is totally on the ball when it comes to "getting the right result". Does IBM and Sun not have partners that could suddenly join these committees to balance the vote (or make it even more farcacle)? Google maybe joining late but they are only 1 against 20!

Totally bemused!

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 02:21 PM PDT

For a look at the haywire process in Norway: http://blogs.freecode.no/isene

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 02:59 PM PDT

What a great book "Microsoft vs the World - the extraordinary lengths that Microsoft goes to to maintain its control on global PC users"

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 03:14 PM PDT

I can't help wondering... Since it is now obvious that there are actual technical issues with the "standard " as proposed and that the proponent (MS or ECMA, take your pick) is clearly not intending to do anything to resolve those issues within the five month window, would it be possible for ISO to observe that the decision to use fast track processing was erroneous and revert to the normal method of processing standard proposals? Is there any precedent?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 05:08 PM PDT

Hi

I find myself disgusted with this process and my confidence in ISO lowered,

Is there someone at ISO to complain to ???

Sean Hennessy
Australia

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 06:02 PM PDT

I assure you that Venezuela will vote for NO, and Ecuador will do what Venezuela wants.

Pakistan and Lebanon  will vote NO likely.

All of then for political reasons

Believe or not, I think on contrary that you think. Shame for USA will vote YES, and a bunch of European countries, forced by USA will vote YES too. Only very high pressure from citizens in those countries can force the vote to abstention at best.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 06:13 PM PDT

Keeping counting : Malta has just been upgraded to P status.  There are now 40 P-Members.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 28 2007 @ 06:56 PM PDT

Brazil is (already was) a P member. We will (proudly) vote No with comments. Not that sure about countries like Venezuela and Equador... right now it seams to be that M$ have at least a good chance to get an approval. We have to admit that M$ implemented a good strategy on this. From their perspectives and following their corporate values, they are executing pretty well.

What is a real shame is that it's not their first time with this kind of tactics and values and, despite of that, corporations and governments all over the world are still doing business and partnering with them.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 29 2007 @ 12:47 AM PDT

Not likely that Venezuella will vote yes. Don't see Hugo Chavez and Steve Balmer as best buddies. Officials could still be corrupt, but generally the political climate in Venezuella seems Open Source friendly.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 30 2007 @ 01:30 AM PDT

Well, from the sound of Andy's description, Microsoft has managed to buy this election.  I'll admit I didn't see it coming, I think mostly because I know next to nothing about how standards bodies operate.  Perhaps those who are more familiar with the process could have foreseen this possible strategy and started to raise efforts against it a few months ago.  I'm not sure whether that would have been helpful.  Should we have engaged in packing the committees with anti MSOOXML participants?  Something about two wrongs not making a right comes to mind.  Microsoft probably would just have spent even more to overwhelm that approach, anyway.  I can't really speculate much about what might have worked because, as I said, I don't know how the standards machine works, so I don't know how to try to defend it against tweaking.

Maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised with the "No" side barely squeaking by, but we probably should start thinking about what to do after Microsoft gets the "Yes" vote it is buying.  Perhaps we should devise an approach to make the existence of the bogus MSOOXML "standard" irrelevant.  Like TCP/IP made the OSI stack irrelevant. Perhaps focusing on persuading large organizations that continuing to hand control of their data over to Microsoft is a dangerous idea.  Maybe promoting the idea that unless a format has multiple independent implementations, it is a dangerous one to use.  Perhaps others will have better ideas than those.

Or find some little-used mechanism in the existing ISO process to challenge the result, or turn it into something that isn't what Microsoft wanted.  I have no idea what that might be.  Others might have some ideas about that.

Despite this spectacular failure, it probably isn't a good idea to try to undermine ISO and thus discredit everything it has done.  As with most large organizations, I imagine there are lots of things suboptimal about ISO, but they probably are useful, on the whole.  I mention it only for completeness.

There probably are other directions to explore, too.  I hope others will bring some good ideas forward to stimulate  enough thought by enough people that we can find a way or ways to continue to advance the true open standard, despite the probable failure on this vote.

We need to think of a way or ways that Microsoft can't nullify by using its big bankroll and existing installed base and mind share.  Even a successful strategy isn't likely to work quickly.  I expect that Microsoft's money and other influence will be able to slow down any strategy, even one that is ultimately successful.  If we are right, the advantages of true open formats will eventually make most users and organizations accept nothing else.  What we want to do is make "eventually" happen a lot sooner than it would otherwise.

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