Microsoft Bought Sweden's ISO Vote on OOXML?

a_n_d_e_r_s writes "The vote on OOXML looked fairly secured. Most in the Working Group in Sweden was against the vote to approve OOXML. The day of the vote, though, more companies showed up at the door. Some 20 new companies — each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote — and vote they did ... for Microsoft. Most of the new companies were partners from Microsoft who suddenly out of the blue joined the Working Group, payed membership fees and voted yes for approval. From the OS2World story: 'The final result was 25 Yes, 6 No and 3 Abs and this would from the start be a done deal of saying No! Jonas Bosson who participated in today's meeting on behalf on FFII said that he left the meeting in protest and so did also IBM's Swedish local representative Johan Westman.'"

Corporate whores

Never has the old phrase been so accurate.

Re:Corporate whores

ME STANDARDIZE YOU LONG TIME!

Re:Corporate whores

Offtopic? - who payed for that trick?

How to defend against this

It's a tactic that's unfortunately too common, but easily defended against, with either of these options:

A) Don't let new members vote for any issues until they've been members for a certain period of time, or

B) Don't let new members vote on any issue that had already been opened for debate (or perhaps officially proposed) prior to their joining.

It's as simple as that.

Re:How to defend against this

It's a tactic that's unfortunately too common, but easily defended against, with either of these options:

A) Don't let new members vote for any issues until they've been members for a certain period of time

It's an issue that we dealt with before even approving bylaws for our organization. Someone in the proposed membership mentioned that they wanted protection against this and we decided to require 6 months in the org before allowing voting membership (or 7 days following the Spring Meeting). This was eventually lowered to 3 months by the membership by vote.

We don't charge dues so anyone could have walked into a meeting and maliciously taken it over with no intentions on doing anything but spend the few dollars we have.

The only reason an organization like this could allow that is because they wanted the money for their coffers and couldn't care less about the actual "standards" being approved.

Re:How to defend against this

Yeah, because nobody has ever thought of planting people ahead of time, and there isn't already a cadre of Microsoft employees, and indeed from every other major computing organization, on every major standards body. All that means is that Microsoft submarines half a dozen people onto any committee they want to work on for some up-front amount of time. It's the Price Is Right Conundrum: any amount of time you put up there on the board, Microsoft will add one dollar - pardon, day - and bid there. Why do you think Netscape, a tiny company, had so many people on the various W3 standards? Why do you think Opera does today? It's the exact same thing, and this is just how these boards work. There's no particular way around it; you can't set time limits, price limits, count of people from a company, because they're all trivially easily gamed.

Any time you make a plutocracy, it will be commercially exploited. If they want to be immune to this crap, they need to move to a meritocracy or an election. Next time you have a solution, put your black hat on and see if you can break it in under 15 seconds of honest thought. (You could have, this time, several different ways.)

Your Windows monopoly money at work.

First the movie studios and HD-DVD, and now standards committees are being purchased.

Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

Buying the outcome is more cost-effective.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

Are their products that poor?

Yes ?

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

:s/?/!/

fixed it for ya.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

:s/\?\/!/

fixed it for you.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

Why should they?

Poor products or not it looks like they invested $50k to cement their format as a standard. Considering they stand to make billions from that, it was a wise investment. It is the people who designed a system that could so easily be bought who should be ashamed, if that wasn't their intended outcome in the first place. A company can't deny its nature.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

Because they don't have to. It's not about poor products, but why leave something to chance when you can seal the deal by splashing some cash around? I'm not defending them, it just makes a lot of sense.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?

Yeah, mostly, but that's irrelevant. They do have a few good products, but that's also irrelevant to sales.

Microsoft's entire history, and IBM's for the previous decodes, demonstrates quite well that sales in any computer-related field are determined almost entirely by marketing budget. Quality is nice, but it doesn't add materially to sales, so if you have the marketing clout, there's no financial reason to also invest heavily in quality.

Sorry to break the news to you. The best product doesn't win. The best-marketed product wins.

There's no (financial) reason that MS should care whether OOXML is good or bad. Their primary concern is that people use it, and this only requires that it be minimally usable. Investing what is for them a small amount to get their encoding declared a "standard" is just a (standard;-) marketing approach, and it would be puzzling if they didn't do it.

Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work.

Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?

Well, it's pretty obvious they're "that poor." What's interesting though is that these sort of tactics show that it's obvious not just to us but to them as well. They have far more confidence in their ability to game the system than they do in their ability to produce products that are competitive on a level playing field (though fortunately, they're often poor at gaming the system as well).

It's simply their corporate culture. I expect it may have to do with the fact that a large number of their programming workforce were hired right out of college without a lot of real-world experience, combined with the fact that their management style is apparently, management by intimidation. Combined, those factors make a pretty lousy recipe for producing quality products on time.

And we are surprised why?

Repeat after me "money buys influence money buys influence money busy influence...."

Too bad the truth gets lost when the money starts talking. *sigh*

We all know that M$ doesn't play fair in terms of open standards, and never will. Why are we surprised?

Re:And we are surprised why?

We all know that M$ doesn't play fair in terms of open standards, and never will. Why are we surprised?

Who said anyone was surprised?

We are outraged.

Ahh...

...good old-fashioned democracy at work. Seriously, though, what kind of organization are they running, here? Any company, from anywhere, can suddenly be a member just by paying 2500-- a nominal fee, for many large companies. That seems like asking for trouble to me.

Re:Ahh...

Any Swedish company can become a member of SIS buy paying somewhere around $300-$500 per year. To be allowed to vote in this particular issue an extra 15 000 Sek ($2500) was needed. So yeah, it is open for anyone with cash (but they had to be members of SIS since before.

They violated ethical standards.

An organization that has no ethics is worthless.

Rules are always more a mater of their spirit than their letter. The protest of other members is real and well founded. It's pretty obvious that M$ played the organizations rules to get a result that is against everything the organization stands for. If the organization does not investigate and punish this kind of blatant abuse, the organization will lose all community respect.

A reasonable US Government would investigate M$ for corrupt foreign practices.

Re:Ahh...

My understanding, from watching Bjarne Stroustrup's lecture before about the standardization process for C++ (also through the ISO), was that you need to attend a certain number of meetings (3?) before you can vote.

Why wasn't this the case here?

Re:Ahh...

I fail to see how anyone other than MS would have anything to gain from pushing OOXML, unless they are getting kickbacks. Even companies partnering with MS would benefit greatly if a more open standard, such as ODF, was being used into which they could integrate into more easily and actually do something useful with. This all sounds like a corruption of the standards organization unlike anything I have ever heard of previously. If this does not become anti-trust material a few years down the road, at least in the EU and Japan, I would very surprised.

Re:Ahh...

I fail to see how anyone other than MS would have anything to gain from pushing OOXML, unless they are getting kickbacks.

They were MS Gold certified companies. They make their living pushing MS products.

Even companies partnering with MS would benefit greatly if a more open standard, such as ODF, was being used into which they could integrate into more easily and actually do something useful with.

I doubt they see it that way. The more people sticking with MS, the more cache "MS Gold certified partner" has. OOXML will be more easy to integrate if everything is already MS.

Re:Ahh...

Having worked for MS Gold partners, MS Gold partners are just extensions of Microsoft itself basically. They push Microsoft products and are not allowed to promote alternative products.

I worked for a hosting company that was a MS Gold partner but our 'free' hosting and static domain names was on Apache/Linux for the 'free' reason and we had to proxy the requests through a bunch of IIS boxes or reroute certain ICMP traffic on the firewall so it would come up as IIS/ASP.NET/Windows 2003 with NetCraft. And then the sales junkie finally got the report that more than 50% of their machines were Windows.

The sales were not allowed to sell Linux or Mac unless specifically asked and persisted on by the customer and then we had to support Apache/PHP/MySQL on Windows (that was back in 2002), then on tradeshows we had to say 70% of our machines were running Windows, that metric we got only because we didn't include our internal Linux service machines (you know Nagios, e-mail, spamfilters, Snort, firewalls, ...).

By the way: we hosted parts of MSN (Belgium) and the dumbest thing they did: buy a cheap Shared Hosting package for MSN advertisements (which were going to display nationwide) and they HARD CODED the shared package URL (msn.server.hostingcompany.com) in MSN Messenger, we had to redirect our nameservers for that URL to a separate server.

Re:Ahh...

All the new companies were MS certified partners, so it was in their best interest to vote the way they did.

Bullshit! Do you know just how bad OOXML is? It's so bad that the only way even Microsoft can benefit from it is by using it as a tool to prop up its monopoly. Hell, I'm not even convinced it's in Microsoft's best interests to be pushing OOXML -- its monopoly might be better served by MS Office implementing ODF, since MS Office still has great mindshare and interface advantages over OpenOffice.

Microsoft's tactic of pushing OOXML is like trying to gain territory via nuclear war: sure, they might get the territory in the end, but it'll be radioactive and worthless.

Evil bastards

Truly, they are evil, and any person of conscience could not work there and retain their integrity.

Re:Evil bastards

Truly, they are evil, and any person of conscience could not work there and retain their integrity.

Sir, walk carefully, for you are treading on other people's livelihoods. I know a number of Microsoft employees, and they couldn't possibly be more offended by your suggestion that they lack the right stuff. At Microsoft, they all feel like they are finally important, like they are finally part of something bigger than themselves. At Microsoft, everybody gets to be an integral part of stealing money from donation boxes and candy from babies.
 
If that's not integrity, what is?

Reminds me of a joke...

This reminds me of a political joke I heard somewhere. I've adapted it to programming.

God was in a good mood and decided to give virtues to people. One day he decided to give all the programmers in the world three virtues:

They would be smart, well-intentioned, and work for Microsoft. But an angel told him: Hey, wait a minute, aren't they too many virtues?
"You're right", said God. "They'll have these virtues but a person can only have two of these virtues at the same time".

Since then, programmers in the world were divided in the three following groups:

Programmers who were smart and well-intentioned, couldn't work for Microsoft.
Programmers who were smart and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be well-intentioned.
Programmers who were well-intentioned and worked for Microsoft, couldn't be smart.

Who paid?

One would think that SIS would not accept new companies to participate in the vote since they haven't been part of the earlier discussions and meetings. But according to SIS they didn't see any problem that new companies wanted to take part in this vote without prior notice. So what happened here is that Microsoft gather together a bunch of loyal partners that would vote yes to their standard without any questions.

Did Microsoft pay their fee? If yes, then they stuffed the box. If not, then 23 companies with a common interest with Microsoft joined an organization to vote for something in their own interests.

ODF vs OOXML FUD with spreadsheets

ODF leaves an astonishing amount as implementation-defined, including most of spreadsheets.

Reference?

Microsoft could easily make Office read and write ODF 100% following the standard, and have horrible interoperability with OpenOffice, simply by not recognize OpenOffice's non-standard elements.

Microsoft is a long-term member of OASIS. They were invited to join the OpenDocument TC. They were even urged to do it by the European Commission. They declined. If, as you say, it would have been easy for them to wiggle their "embrace extend extinguish" technique into the cracks between ODF and the actual file format of OpenOffice, then WHY DIDN'T THEY DO THAT?

And, also, why did they refuse to extend ODF to incorporate those precious (formalized / parameterized) AutoSpaceLikeWord95 features, which would have been a PITA for their competition to implement? Now they are actually whining that ODF isn't "feature-complete" enough for them so they had to invent OOXML.

I think any comment that ODF would be deficient as the default file format for Microsoft Office is FUD until you can provide examples.

There are lots of detailed examples that OOXML is crap (see the commentary of those national bureaus that weren't silenced or corrupted), the ODF spec is approx 10% as many pages as OOXML, surely you can come up with *some* examples where it is deficient? Otherwise all you do is spreading Microsoft's FUD.

You mentioned spreadsheets: please enlighten us with your comments. Is it about par. 8.1.3 p. 189,

Formulas allow calculations to be performed within table cells. Every formula should begin with a namespace prefix specifying the syntax and semantics used within the formula.

?

Agreed, that's under-specified and would benefit from a future clarification, such as OpenFormula [oasis-open.org].

But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).

THAT is what those companies and national bureaux voted for, to make that an international standard. They should be ashamed.

Re:ODF vs OOXML FUD with spreadsheets

But it's not wrong, unlike the "dates start at either 1900 or 1904 i forget which but at least 1900 is a leap year from now on" crap from OOXML (part 4, par. 3.17.4.1, p. 2522, if you don't believe me -- I almost fell of my chair when I read that paragraph).

I didn't entirely believe this, and anyone else who didn't should go here like I did: ECMA Standard Office Open XML Formats [ecma-international.org]. Although the writing style is slightly less retarded than in fritsd's paraphrased version, the writing content isn't. It turns out that the 1900-based dating is screwed up "for legacy reasons" (in an unstandardized format that didn't exist in any previous versions??) As the spec states,

"A consequence of this is that for dates between January 1 and February 28, WEEKDAY shall return a value for the day immediately prior to the correct day, so that the (non-existent) date February 29 has a day-of-the-week that immediately follows that of February 28, and immediately precedes that of March 1."

I'd like to read further to try to understand why they're expressing integers as "1.0000000..." instead of "1.0" or even "1", but I'm starting to fear that the Stupid might be contagious.

Google Joined to say No

Kudos to Google for being one of those to "suddenly" join, but on the "No" side. Most of the other companies on the list of new arrivals [tryggve.se] are unfamiliar to me, excepting Google and HP, and we don't officially know how HP's vote went.

Shame on the others for having no sense of decency.

Interesting ...

... in Germany, Deutsche Telekom and Google would have voted "no". However, both were not allowed to vote because they came in late. And another guy left the voting session early, but his "yes" was counted although before it was said that only votes count that were given in presence. (according to Heise (german) [heise.de])

Re:Interesting ...

Hmm.. Interestingly enough, the german IBM delegate then somehow managed to join the Kenyan delegation, and managed to write the objection. How can someone be both a german and kenyan delegate?

http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/2007/05/has-ibm-an nexed-kenyan-iso-national.html [blogspot.com]

Sounds like both sides aren't playing fair.

But... didn't they want it like that?

Step 1 - allow votes to be bought.
Step 2 - take money from companies who wish to buy votes.
Step 3 - Profit!
Step 3a - Complain about the unfairness of it all, all the way to the bank.

Like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is any help

Shame the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act does not work for Working Groups.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Corrupt_Pract ices_Act [wikipedia.org]

Self Interest

I dont see this as "being bought", so much as the self interest of the companies who voted. If you're a Microsoft partner, it's in your best interest to vote for Microsoft. However I'm sure Microsoft rang their phones to "remind them" that they could go vote.

No Surprise

I would file this under corporate strategy. One could argue that it would have been irresponsible for Microsoft (or any business for that matter) to not attempt to sway a decision that directly impacts their business through lobbying tactics where it has the ability to do so. Plus, there was nothing to indicate that it involved nefarious or illegal methods to do so.

I'm sure many would do the same with their own companies to bolster support for something they created.

PR from FFII Sweden

Partial translation of FFII Sweden press release:
http://ffii.se/pr/2007-08-27-se-ooxml-vote-en.html [ffii.se]

Just like at the end of Deadwood

The rich dude (Hearst) walked away with town and all its gold by rigging local elections. Unbelievable.

irrelevant

irrelevant in a way because ODF looks to be fast becoming a de-facto standard regardless. out numbering OOXML something in the order of 250 to 1.

see:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/05/so-where-are-a ll-ooxml-documents.html [robweir.com]
http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/archive/2007 0813-1201 [geniisoft.com]

of course, the MS tactic is to get OOXML recognized and then default to it across the windows suite.

but as I remember they have tried this was a number of formats before - but once a file format is recognized as a de-facto standard (MP3, HTML, JPG) they are notoriously hard to shift.

irrelevant as it may be its still a damn depressing indication of the way business is done and sensible, rational decisions are perverted to line company pockets. this sort of thing annoys me.

More OOXML shenanigans

I'm surprised it has not been covered on slashdot, but similar things have occured in Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Portugal, Australia, etc. Microsoft is determined to push its proprietary "open" format through by any means neccessary:

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200708241 23112581 [groklaw.net]

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200708151 25524759 [groklaw.net]

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200707232 35113424 [groklaw.net]

Corporate Democracy In Action ... No Doubt!

"Corporate Democracy In Action" protects defenseless corporate, government, and religious institutions from the ravages of the viral public infestation attempting to managing national interest, markets, and resources. Corporatism estates include the public contained within which can be bought, sold, spent ... as the owning corporatism estate finds most beneficial to sustainment.

It would be a sad state of affairs if the oligarchical owners of draconian institution, whom dress in godly-patriotic and humanitarian camouflage, could not continue to service the public for private pseudo-sexual (megalomania) satisfaction.

God bless them, one and all, for servicing US, EU, UN ... Citizens with such an overt and public display of power and control (ThemS&MostOthers) and leaving no doubt that any public demonstration without financial dictate is pitifully fake.

Paraphrasing an old social philosopher; "Any war will kill my enemy (the citizens), but I need to make sure I win." They always dress in dress in godly-patriotic and humanitarian camouflage. More US, EU, UN ... corporate welfare, less for US, EU, UN ....

"Corporate Democracy In Action" is good for US, EU, UN ... Corporations.

"We The People" are the property of the corporate-estate.
Within the New World Order Corporate Estates, exploitation
will get you much further in life then complaining. In a
war you must be on the "RightSide" to be in control.

Important action to be taken

Any person involved in Sweden (and any other country where purportedly similar shady actions occurred) with this issue should help to make sure that as much evidence as possible is registered, as it may be necessary in the future.

Possible things:
The odd 20 companies, who represented them, presentations lists of previous meetings showing their absence, etc., etc.

Bert

No cheating plz

There are places where using open standards is a requirement, and Microsoft is trying to get in by creating their own 'standard' and buying voters to approve it as an ISO standard. To avoid this cheating, open standards adopters could add a rule that says: a truly open standard is one that has at least two different implementations (from distinct vendors). This principle rules out 'standards' that are not really open.

PAID. PAID. PAID. not payed

I know that to be cool on /. you're not supposed to have even minimal competence in English, especially for native English speakers. But why not be even cooler and rebel against this retarded ethos! Be bold and brave! Dare to spell!

What of ISO's credibility now?

Hmm. If things continue this way, and we end up with the ISO effectively rubber-stamping OOXML on the strength of purchased votes, what effect will this have on the ISO's credibility in the long run? The ISO looks after a lot more standards than just data exchange formats; will we have to consider that every single one of those standards is potentially bought and paid for by its richest benecifiaries, despite technical flaws in the standard and opposition from peers?

I can't help thinking that the OOXML standardisation effort should be shelved until one of two things becomes true: either at least two or more independent implementations, developed by distinct organisations from the specification alone, can be shown to interoperate to a degree that justifies the moniker "standard"; or preferably, a complete reference implementation, with full source code available under a BSD (or equally permissive) licence, is submitted with the proposal. In fact, I can't understand why this isn't, er, standard practice. Were it so, the OOXML efforts could be trivially dismissed on technical grounds, and this whole dog and pony show could be avoided.

conspiracytheory

This story is (anonymously) tagged "conspiracytheory". I'd like to see the coincidence theorist explain how this happened without Microsoft's trademark coordinating manipulations.

What infuriates me...

is not that Microsoft bought all those votes - but that the ISO let them. And that we can't do anything about it. Or can we? I'd love to know how.

Most were against!?

The submitter writes that most people in the Working Group were against the OOXML, then 20 new companies show up and vote yes for a final vote tally of 25-6-3 in favour. Even without those