Microsoft Open XML OOXML
Microsoft’s open document format for interchangeable web documents is finally given approval from the international standards designation.
Are we now seeing a truly open access to this standard or is it simply a case of cracking the Government and industry market place ?
Dan Horton SEO
Ian M 1875 days ago
Absolutely NOT open access to this standard. They bought votes en-masse (there were major voting irregularities in many places around the world, like in Norway 19 against 3 in favour, and they got the panel to vote yes), smeared opponents, bribed partners to vote for them, and outright lied over and over again.
It’s absolutely shocking what they did – it’s truly 1990′s pre-antitrust Microsoft back with a vengeance. The only downside this time is that everyone saw and documented what went on, and they are seriously going to suffer in the long run from the fallout of their actions, which have in some cases quite possibly broken existing laws.
The standard is a complete farce – Microsoft have put out a worthless “convenant not to sue” on the issue of patents, which they can withdraw any time and which doesn’t apply to their truly biggest competitor in the space – free and open software. The standard is a complete mess, with errors all the way through it, plus it’s so confusing that only Microsoft can earily implement it. Not only that, Microsoft, not any standards body (well, ECMA basically gave them a blank cheque) get to change the standard how they want, which is exactly how they’ve forced out competitors many times in the past.
There’s no reason they couldn’t have just used ODF like the rest of the world. No reason, except control.
Them succeeding in buying out ISO was one of the saddest things to happen in technology this decade – now many people don’t trust ISO any more, and for good reason. The only hope from this is that Microsoft suffer the consequences of their actions in the longer term as what they did gets through to people like antitrust figures, and that ISOs procedures get shaken up.
Ian M 1875 days ago
There’s a reasonably concise version of events here:
http://www.tideway.com/community/blog-post/how-to-buy-a-standard-in-10-days/
g1smd 1874 days ago
That’s a big step backwards.
There will be fallout from that decision for years. It makes ISO look like a bunch of morons.
The “standard” implements broken and half-baked proprietory ideas, and relies on internal workings of Microsoft products (which are not detailed) for implementation.
What a joke.
Bastards.