Microsoft Bought Sweden's ISO Vote on OOXML? 340
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Corporate whores (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Corporate whores (Score:4, Funny)
How to defend against this (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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From the summary: ...each one payed about $2500 to be allowed to vote...
So, there are about 2500 * 20 = 50000 reasons they should be allowed to vote.
Re:How to defend against this (Score:5, Insightful)
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.)
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Instead I was able to join in and bring transparency to the meeting, even though the NB's representativy unilaterally decided to give less than 48h before refusing new members, as it saw that Microsoft's control would be wrestled out.
They don't give that excuse, of cou
Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why can't Microsoft compete without buying the outcome of the game? Are their products that poor?
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Funny)
Yes ?
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Funny)
fixed it for ya.
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:4, Funny)
fixed it for you.
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Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yeah, because a company with $40,000,000,000 in the bank could not have just hired people to make a standard people want to use.
Sure they could. But you're missing the point: They don't want to!. They would've prefered no standards at all and the status quo of being allowed to essentially define the standard -- the standard is whatever the latest office does. Only as it became obvious that people would no longe accept that did they go for a standard at all. And now they're doing their best to make a "st
Yes yes yes (Score:3)
Companies do not exist outside of the people that comprise them. Humans ARE capable of controlling their actions. A company's "nature" is totally dictated by the people that comprise it.
Lets put it another way.
We should expect people to behave like scheming pricks when we're designing systems which confer influence; Like electoral systems, ISO standards etc. Because there are psychopaths, sociopaths and others with defective personalities out there who'll simply use them to their personal advantage.
To do otherwise is not just naive or unwise, it's downright stupid.
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:4, Funny)
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Yes.
http://www.arstdesign.com/articles/OOXML-is-defec
Re:Your Windows monopoly money at work. (Score:5, Informative)
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Money busy influence?
I repeat, but people look at me weird...
Re:And we are surprised why? (Score:4, Informative)
We are outraged.
Ahh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Informative)
They violated ethical standards. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Letting any company vote is probably not the best way to go about this, but at a certain level you do have to take into account to some degree what the majority of the IT industry thinks.
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Seriously, though, what kind of organization are they running
I think this is the nub of the problem. ISO standards are used all around the world to protect people - and they're certainly used for far more important things than document formats.
But in the case of car manufacturers or construction engineers or whoever else, the ISO protects the companies by providing highly quality standard by which to work. If Ford etc follow the standards for manufacturing their cars yet one of them still crashes or explodes or whatever, then Ford is covered (somewhat) by its adhe
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Why wasn't this the case here?
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It is hard to say what the case was here, because the info only seems to be coming from bloggers on one side of the issue. This is not to say they are wrong, but there is definate spin going on. They immediately claimed microsoft bought the vote without providing any evidence. All the new companies were MS certified partners, so it was in their best interest to vote the way they did.
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Informative)
They were MS Gold certified companies. They make their living pushing MS products.
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.
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Re:Ahh... (Score:5, Informative)
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... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
3 meetings to vote .. (Score:3, Informative)
Who paid? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
- OOXML gets rejected by ISO
- Public procurement policies dictate ODF
- Microsoft supports ODF
- Customers are free of lock-in
- Larger percentage will choose F/LOSS
- costs shift from license fees to training / consulting
- more money for local companies.
ODF vs OOXML FUD with spreadsheets (Score:5, Insightful)
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,
?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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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2 year."
What legacy reasons? Was there an ancient excel version that MS didn't bother to fix a date bug in that they are carrying through even today? Why should they? Anyone bothering to use some ancient excel version likely wouldn't bother with the brand new office 2007 and its "open" Office XML filesystem would they? I mean if they were going to change, they'd probably prefer to have it correct
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Who paid?. Microsoft partners pay money to Microsoft for licenses. Was a discount offered or money exchanged?
If a community is full of Christians and they vote along their beliefs, does that mean the church controls the city?
Considering the market share of Microsoft products, is it possible that there would be more technical companies aligned with them than others? Do you think Microsoft and all of its partners should only have 1 vote? If a Microsoft partner voted ag
Google Joined to say No (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
All signs point to HP having voted YES (Score:3, Informative)
You can see how each party voted here:
US OOXML VOTE 08/24/2007 [itic.org]
Notable YES votes include MS, HP, APPLE, INTEL, SONY.
Notable NO votes were IBM.
It's amusing that slashdot carried hugh headlines for the NO vote, but hasn't covered the YES vote at all (unless I just missed it).
BTW, the US YES vote is a reversal of the 08/10/200
Interesting ... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interesting ... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://ooxmlhoaxes.blogspot.com/2007/05/has-ibm-a
Sounds like both sides aren't playing fair.
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Sun is not IBM. They are separate businesses with different business interests. The ODF spec represents an intersection of those interests. That is a good thing for the format and its users. Are you really claiming that ODF would be better if it was created by people who wanted it to fail?
Microsoft is a single business. Their interest is in dressing up their format as a standard while locking customers in and competitors out.
But... didn't they want it like that? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
irrelevant (Score:3, Interesting)
see:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2007/05/so-where-are-
http://www.geniisoft.com/showcase.nsf/archive/200
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 (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070824
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070815
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070723
Corporate Democracy In Action ... No Doubt! (Score:2)
It would be a sad state of affairs if the oligarchical owners of draconian institution, whom dress in godly-patriotic and humanitar
What of ISO's credibility now? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
What infuriates me... (Score:3, Interesting)
The list (Score:3, Informative)
- Camako Data AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Connecta AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Cornerstone Sweden AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Cybernetics (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Emric AB
- Exor AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- Fishbone Systems AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Formpipe Software (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- FS System AB
- Google
- HP (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- IBizkit AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- IDE Nätverkskonsulterna (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- IT-Vision AB
- Illuminet
- Know IT (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Modul1 (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Nordic Station AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- ReadSoft AB (Microsoft Certified Partner)
- Sogeti (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- Solid Park AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- SourceTech AB
- Strand Interconnect AB (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
- TietoEnator (Microsoft Gold Certified Partner)
If you work for any of these companies, please contact management and ask them to explain themselves.Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My previous employer (one of the GC partners above) has been pushing open source to be used within the company. I joined this effort thinking it could bring more focus on open formats, but I saw a while ago that this attitude did not seem to apply to top management, so I left the company. I hope others join me in doing so.
6546 pages? (Score:4, Informative)
What can each of us do to stop OOXML in the ISO? (Score:4, Insightful)
I take it that the 3 "monitors" terms have expired (Score:3, Insightful)
But, probably not for another year, as long as Bush is pres.
MS bashing (Score:3, Interesting)
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The normal way things are supposed to work is that all parties to the vote debate prior to voting. This allows various opinions to be heard and concerns addressed.
In this case the whores were ex-parte to the debate then overran the vote nearly 2:1.
-nB
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We (can and should) expect from that organisation decisions based on technical merit, the OOXML has no such thing.
But even if the ISO cert would be granted I eventually expect court cases evolving out of the inherent contradiction of calling it an Open Standard and at the same time referring to closed sources.
Re:Sore losers (Score:5, Interesting)
You're right we should stop whining & petition ISO to change the rules on voting to block this kind of ballot stuffing. I doubt very much that any of these companies have seen the document spec let alone read & understand it.
This is actually one of the fairer subversions of the process - in Portugol they denied IBM & SUN access claiming the room was too full, then allowed MS partners to enter & vote. In another place, the chairman - an employee of an MS partner announced the voting procedure as
Now that's how to really stack the deck - you completely remove the option to vote against the standard.
The funniest thing of all (Score:5, Funny)
This is a quote from the SIS.SE home page:
Translation in english: "It's not money that makes the world go around. Do you want to know what it is?"
Apparently the answer is: money
Re:Sore losers (Score:4, Insightful)
If I find a bug in WoW that allows me to get a million gold everytime I click a specific key combo, you, Blizzard and every WoW player would call it cheating, even though the "rules" of the game include that bug at that point.
Cheating is not breaking the rules. Cheating is breaking the spirit of the rules, whether or not you literaly break them. In fact, most cheating happens by lawyer-weaseling your way through the loopholes in the rules. Most board game rules do not explicitly forbid you to look at the cards stacked face-down on the board, but everyone would agree that doing so is cheating.
And that's exactly what happened here.
Re:Sore losers (Score:4, Insightful)
You do realize monopolies are restrained by law because they subvert the free market forces, right? For example, if you have a monopoly in one area you can use it to extract more money from a market while expending less investment and giving less to consumers, thus accumulating piles of money you can use to say, pay other companies to act on you behalf in meetings. Or pressure other companies to act on you behalf under threat of financially ruining them by cutting them out of markets that interact with the one(s) controlled by your monopoly.
This particular round of misdeeds is just one more symptom of the main problem, MS is an abusive monopoly with so much money they've been able to buy the politicians who run the courts and are supposed to enforce the law.
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I think you'll find that the law changes are only to require "open" standards, which is *why* MS are pursuing ISO certification now. If this wasn't the case, then why would a company who own (I'm guessing here) 99% of the "office" application market and have done for a good number of years, suddenly decide they need certification?
Also, the only reason OOXML gets a slating 'round these parts, is because it is a very poor "standard", and it appears to omit enough detail to make i
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Nonsense. The ODF supporters want an open format, so that there is no more microsoft lock-in in the office applications market. Some of these are indeed supporting it for commercial reasons (sun and googl
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False. Well, there are two kinds of monopolies.
Do you know what a "non sequitur" is? It is when you make a statement like "False" in response to my claim that monopolies undermine the free market, and then you follow that statement with more statements that in no way back up your argument.
Firstly you get the types of monopolies wrong. There are natural monopolies which result from natural phenomenon, such as geography and there are monopolies imposes by unnatural forces such as a law, a lock-in technology, or via bundling. Secondly, any monopoly can
Re:Sore losers (Score:5, Insightful)
In this case, it's a chance to vote on an international standard -- one that many governments are obliged to allow, support or follow. This is, in effect, a chance to "buy" your way into government policy.
But there are certainly, in my opinion, two problems here:
1. That the ability to vote has such low entry requirements and that no amount of knowledge or understanding seems to have any bearing on whether or not someone is qualified to vote. (yes, I realize you could make the same argument for local elections, and I do.)
2. That Microsoft has no shame in deploying such an obvious, self-serving tactic of essentially buying their way into being elected as an international standard. It may be 'legal' but it's unethical and definitely not right.
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Re:Sore losers (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, the fact that these people joined the discussion only *after* the debate on those technical merits was over only shows that this process has become nothing more than a high-school president election in a bad B-movie.
Re: Controversy should nix acceptance (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry to break this to you, but ISO approval of standards is supposed to be governed by TECHNICAL considerations. By this logic, a vote on whether OOXML is approved by fasttrack should be based on the TECHNICAL merits of the proposal, not on how popular Micorosft Corp. is.
Sadly, the fact that these people joined the discussion only *after* the debate on those technical merits was over only shows that this process has become nothing more than a high-school president election in a bad B-movie.
Indeed, and I will go one further: the fact that there is so much controversy over the proposal should immediately tank it, regardless of who 'wins'. Standards are based on CONSENSUS, not mob rule. Given the evident controversy, the proposal clearly is not ready for standardization, let alone by a 'fast-track' process. If at some point, the political controversy dies down, ECMA-376 matures, and the industry shows some sings of consensus, let the proposal be resubmitted. But if there is a *hint* of impropri
Re:Sore losers (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop whining? Certainly. STFU? I don't think so.
There's more to this issue than "mummy mummy microsoft did a bad thing and it's not faaaaaair!". The question we should be asking is "Is this the sort of behaviour we really want to encourge?"
Do we really want an industry where standards are sold to the highest bidder without any scrutiny as to fitness for their supposed purpose. If so, the ISO committees may as well pack their bags and go home now, because we are headed for a world where no one will pay any attention at all to their so called "standards".
I think that merits some discussion. Not because Microsoft did a Bad Thing so much, but because the standards process served a useful purpose. Microsoft may well be willing to burn this process to the ground in order to protect their file formats. I think the least we could do is shout "FIRE!"
"Ready! Aim! ..." (Score:4, Funny)
...so long as MS is against the wall. Blindfolds or not, I don't care.
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What part of "monopoly laws" don't you understand? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now they are
Re:What part of "monopoly laws" don't you understa (Score:3, Informative)
You fail to see the point in here. Microsoft has become a living entity. It's not Gates, nor Ballmer. It's Microsoft itself, along with its shareholders and leaders. Its corporate structure has been adapted to become a monopoly, and to step on everything to fulfill its goals. Anyone disagreeing with it is rejected, and seen as a pathogen agent to keep the system running.
Microsoft has become a cancer for the free world, and it must die.
Re:What part of "capitalism" don't you understand? (Score:4, Interesting)
Only, instead of a state, we have a corporation, Microsoft.
They buy their power with their money. And a big part of their money comes from our wallets via taxes.
I mean, a really big part.
I mean a part much bigger than what you'd think.
I mean, much bigger than what I'd think, too.
I mean, *huge*.
Then, with this power, they take away what really is common goods. Or aren't "standards"?
Communism.
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Re:What part of "capitalism" don't you understand? (Score:5, Insightful)
- unsafe products
- unhealthy products
- unsustainable processes
- suppression of the truth about unsafe products
- exploitation of the poor and the uninformed
- outsourcing (abandonment of the community)
- tax evasion
- consumerism
- competition that puts profits before people
- profitable relationship with war
But then if you accept the premise that People Don't Matter, all the above makes perfect sense.
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The F/OSS people make themselves look like ninnies by whining over this. Capitalism is war for the most profit, by any means necessary that aren't illegal. This wasn't illegal. They won. Either change the rules, or stop complaining.
Even if this is "war" what do you propose OOXML opponents (and its not just "F/OSS people") do? Sit back and take it? Shrug it off as a right of the Interest with the biggest available budget?
The first steps to countering these kinds of shennanigans is bringing them to light. Change the rules? Maybe. But definitely make sure everyone understands what is going on first. Let's call a spade a spade.
Microsoft will likely call it as some kind of standards mandate; justification for their work. Denial of
What part of "corporatism" don't you undersand? (Score:3, Insightful)
Capitalism is based on supply and demand, where companies or individuals create the supply to fill the demands of the customer. It is as simple as that. (Okay, it's never as simple as that.)
As soon as you support powerful corporations manipulating the market in any way, you are not longer a capitalist. You are a corporatist.
Let's talk about change (Score:2)
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Welcome to the real world. The vast majority of people work where they do to keep a shirt on their back.
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Apparently Google showed up at the last moment to vote on the other side and they're by definition Not Evil. So, truly, they are not evil.
Re:Evil bastards (Score:5, Funny)
If that's not integrity, what is?
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Recruiters always told me that working for them I could "make a real difference, be a voice for the customers/end-users, unlike anywhere else". I saw that my managers, many of whom had put in 8+ years already, were just gett
Reminds me of a joke... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Re:Probably Stupid Question (Score:5, Informative)
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Supporters of open standards wish for Microsoft to adhere to a true standard, one that is well-documented, easily implemented, and available for all. Currently, ODF does all that.
OOXML, on the other hand, is obtuse, hard to implement (even for Microsoft), leaves much unspecified, and is Microsoft-centric, rather than document-centric.
The problem is actually with Microsoft. They have rigged the system to favor their platform above all others, rather than risk losing their stranglehold on your doc
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