ISO Says No To Microsoft's OOXML Standard 315
qcomp writes "The votes are in and Microsoft has lost for now, reports the FFII's campaign website OOXML. The 2/3 majority needed to proceed with the fast-track standardization has not been achieved. Now the standard will head to the ballot resolution meeting to address the hundreds of technical comments submitted along with the votes." Here is yesterday's speculation as to how the vote would turn out.
I wonder? (Score:3, Interesting)
Good (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember folks, for a company of several hundred thousand, unfortunately not all are going to be good guys - theres plenty more that are however.
Flame away.
Re:System continues to work (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Some details... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:OOXML and ODF both suck (Score:5, Interesting)
I fail to see the fuss, both formats suck and really have no place as a desktop publishing format. They are crappy WYSIWYG data dumps that are heavily tied to rendering algorithms of their respective editor and really are not archival safe.
Indeed. You'll also find that hammers are poor at undoing screws and cars aren't so good at taking you overseas.
What is it going to be like 50 years from now when you try to pull up an old manuscript? You know how Popular Science likes to pull up magazine issues from 40+ years ago, I wonder how they are going to manage that 40 years from now when the proprietary and open file formats are unsupported and "obsolete".
They'll use a format that actually meant for that sort of thing like, say, PDF.
The point of "WYSIWYG" is not - despite what a lot of people (including those that should know better) think - that a document looks the same on computer B as it does on computer A. It's that the document that comes out of the printer looks the same as it does on the screen.
Word processing != desktop publishing.
Re:I wonder? (Score:4, Interesting)
I rather suspect that OOXML is in fact dead, even if they eventually manage to get an ISO certification. Its too late now. After all ODF is already an ISO, easier to implement then OOXML, patent free, with no issues of any type whatsoever. People will choose it simply because its the better format. OOXML will be what people use if they must interact with Microsoft office.
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
You could have said that and people would have believed you, so why lie?
After all the furore in Sweden, Norway and Hungary, would people still find it difficult to believe that a few 'coutries' like Cote' de Ivorie, Cyprus etc. were bribed to vote 'Yes'?
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Please vote for our standard. BTW we make the only software can use it properly and we wont sell it to you".
http://www.microsoft.com/exporting/faq.htm [microsoft.com]
Re:Good (Score:2, Interesting)
You cannot project the individual up the corporation, however. (And it's not several hundred thousand. Last I looked, they were still under seventy thousand employees.) I don't know any members of the executive staff or board, however, and THAT's where decisions like this OOXML fiasco come from.
The culture within the company makes sure that the only people who can survive well enough to make it to the junior or senior executive level are cutthroat enough to think up plans like this. It's been that way since the 80s. It's taken until the last few years, though, for the company to grow enough that there's enough yes-men under the execs to insulate them from some levels of negative market reaction to their behavior. For a long time fines where just a cost of doing business at MSFT. I don't think they've realized until too late that the segment of the industry actively working against them is growing rapidly and is more effective than ever before.
The fact that they actually believed Vista was worth releasing was one clue. Another is that they've lost this initial push at OOXML. The third might not come until they try to EOL XP. (Or if IBM decides to chase the money from the SCO/IBM lawsuits.)
Re:How bad is this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anecdote time.
About a year ago, a client of mine gave me a PDF and some source files and said "We can't edit this. Please fix the problem." The document itself was in Word 2.0. The graphics were WMFs. This thing had been originally created in Windows 3.1 and updated (with the WMFs) in Windows 95. The client couldn't open up any of it.
The Word file was basically a non-starter. I just ignored it and stripped the text out of the PDF instead. The graphics, though...The PDF refused to be opened properly in Illustrator, so I couldn't recover them that way. I also could not open the WMFs directly -- it was something about how they were tied to the original platform. What I ended up doing was digging up an ancient copy of Windows and and ancient copy of Illustrator, building a custom machine just for this operation, and recovering the files that way. The client paid about $3,000 for the privilege of being able to update one of their own files. Just one file, mind, and it had yet to be actually updated -- this was simply establishing the ability to update. All because they were couldn't see what a bad idea it was to invest their data in lock-in formats.
When I explained to the client how they had gotten into this mess, and how they could avoid it in the future, they stared blankly back. We use up-to-date versions of Word now, they said.
Oh, well, I thought, here comes another few grand in my pocket. But then again, in another few years, maybe nobody has these old copies of Windows and old copies of Illustrator anymore, and then they are SOL.
Re:OOXML and ODF both suck (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you seen the actual break down of which way countries voted? Scroll down a little way in the FTA comments and it's laid out in a table. It's amazing in that with the exception of the US, the voting is almost consistently "No" from rich, developed countries, and "Yes" from poorer Eastern European and African countries that are stereotypically more corrupt. The jokes people are making about Microsoft buying the votes of Banana Republics are not without a basis. Worth looking through the list.
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems to me that, by and large, standards organizations like ISO have done a pretty good job of keeping their communities free from this kind of bias. What usually happens is that some other large gorilla in the community opposes the position and throws his weight onto the opposite side of the issue.
Let's not generate our own version of FUD here (Oh, M$ is trying to steal the election so ISO is not doing its job, lets replace/modify ISO). Simply point out what tis going on and let the community respond.
Why any Yes Votes? (Score:4, Interesting)
At least it worked out for now. Pretty sad though that Microsoft tried to stack the deck. If some serious revisions in their policy toward joining and voting isn't changed we'll see more abuse by Microsoft until they finally get it passed.
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope folks at NIST are suitably embarrassed about approving such a shoddy spec as a standard, regardless of who it came from.
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
Can anyone in the know comment?
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:3, Interesting)
> (you know the ones that don't normally voted but suspiciously wanted to this time) all voted for YES
You can't stop it, Microsoft is leveraging the inherent weakness all "international instituitions" suffer from. The fantasy that every soverign nation is somehow equal. It is the same one that made the UN into a parliment of tyrants.
And no, I don't really have a solution to the problem. But I could offer a few suggestions to improve this situation.
1) You have to be a dues paying member for three years before you get a vote. That stops countries from being induced to jump in for one vote.
2) You have to be in the top half (two thirds, whatever) of nations in the general industry you want to vote in standards for. That means Cyprus, etc., not being known for their software industry probably wouldn't have been allowed a vote on OOXML. Unfair? Yes, but life isn't fair and giving them a vote is more unfair to everyone else. Perhaps give all the small fry a subcommittee that gets a couple of votes if they are mostly in consensus on an issue.
3) Punish entites who openly game the system like Microsoft is doing. Say toss all MIcrosoft reps from ISO sponsored groups for five years and publicly rebuke national bodies who allowed their votes to be openly rigged.
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
1) You have to be a dues paying member prior to the submission for consideration in order to vote on that submission. That stops countries from being induced to jump in simply to influence the voting on that one issue.
2) You have to participate in a majority of the discussions (say 75 percent) in order to vote (no last minute O->P upgrades of NBs which had not been involved in any of the discussions).
3) Representatives of the organization requesting the submission are disqualified from voting in any National Body (ECMA in this case).
4) Representatives of any company or organization involved in creating the specification of the proposed standard are disqualified from voting in any National Body (ECMA and Microsoft in this case).
5) Any National Body which is found to have irregularities in their process would be disqualified from participation in all votes for a period of time (say 1 year for the first offense, 5 years for the second). There are two many instances to list.
Re:It ain't over yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
After reading your comment I initially though "well, we were part of the almost, an exception to the rule", but to be blunt the truth is that *this is* a Bananas' Republic: only in one would the above happen.
Why the netherlands voted no (Score:1, Interesting)
Our group investigated the standard and made a huge list of what was wrong with it (certain things were being skipped over, while over things were listed twice in the standard's documents). These comments were then submitted with the first vote (we voted "No, with comments" the first time).
This vote, the second time, our group looked and saw that hardly any of our concerns were taken care off, so they wanted to submit a "No, with comments" again, with the SAME comments as the previous time. This however is NOT allowed by the ISO, hence the vote got changed to a "No, without comments"
Re:How bad is this? (Score:3, Interesting)
That experience of mine, IMHO, demonstrates exactly why properly open formats are essential. Microsoft's own poor support for its proprietary format would have caused me to lose data.