Perhaps you could do a standards-oriented review of the book?

Thanks for making your opinion count. I should note that other countries have their own national standards bodies. A list of JTC1 NB members for other nations, as well as contact information is on GrokLaw here.

Although JTC1 has not issued a public “call for comments” or anything like that, it can’t hurt to express your informed opinion, in a polite way to those who represent your country in the international standards arena.

Microsoft seems to have a railroad system with many different gauges,
different rolling stock sizes and signalling conventions — there are
even signals which show Red for Go and Green for Stop: a mistake was
made, the Microsoft drivers know about it and it is too much trouble to change it now.

Anybody wanting to transport their goods over Microsoft’s system has to transfer them to Microsoft rolling stock — and they then can’t be transferred back out again undamaged.

What people want is a railway system that covers the country: with one gauge, one set of height and width limits for rolling stock and a clearly defined signalling system with no secret bits that one company can use to make things more difficult or expensive for its competitors.

Fire up your mail clients and drop a (polite, technically meritorious) email to <isot@ansi.org>, or fax something to:

Scully, Henrietta
Program Manager, Standards Facilitation (ISOT)
fax: 212.730.1346

Cornish, Steven P.
Program Director, International Policy
fax: 212.730.1346

Kushnier, Gary W.
Vice President, International Policy
fax: 202.293.9287

Rajchel, Lisa
Director, International Secretariats Standards Facilitation
fax: 212.840.2298

The more protests they get, the more likely our voices are to be heard at the ISO.

I will post my letter on my website (click my name above as soon as it’s sent.

Isn’t it strange that ISO/IEC JTC1 has it in their reach to do what no government body has been able to achieve?

ISO can restore competition to the desktop productivity environment simply by rejecting MOOX based on the massive contradictions it poses to existing ISO products. They can break the monopolist grip, leveling the playing field in ways that the hapless and hopeless USA Anti Trust action/settlement sadly failed to do.

So here we are. A cornerstone for the future of the Open Internet, where desktop, server and device systems globally connect and exchange information with ease, is now in the hands of ISO/IEC JTC1 representatives.

If they stand by ODF, alternatives to MSOffice and the Vista Information Processing Chain will finally have their shot.

If they stand by ODF, the risk of investing in alternatives to Microsoft products will significantly decrease. And when that happens, governments demanding ODF solutions will finally have access to the kind of alternative applications that will make sense of what is today an impossible challenge – making the real world migration from MSOffice bound business processes and information systems to ODF enabled systems. Systems where open Internet aggregates of SaaS, SOA, Web 2.0 Hubs, and enterprise publication, content and archive management systems can easily connect and exchange info with desktop productivity systems.

The ISO/IEC decision comes at a most important moment in time. Microsoft is nearing a moment when they finally have all the pieces in place to effectively leverage their desktop monopoly into server, device and Internet systems markets. The MS product pipeline for this push, the Vista Stack, is filled with systems, services and applications that have one undeniable advantage over all competitors – integration with the MSOffice bound desktop.

The MS server, device and Internet systems all feature advanced integration with the MSOffice productivity environment. A level of integration that can’t be touched by competitors. Even those entrenched in enterprise services such as Oracle, Sun and IBM.

At the heart of this “advanced integration” is control over desktop productivity file formats. Of course Microsoft markets this monopolist exclusive integration advantage as the most helpful and harmless sounding “interoperability by design”. The truth is that this monopolist expansion ploy depends in large part on MSOffice information and information processes remaining bound to Microsoft applications and systems. Bound even as that information moves across the Internet using MOOX as the transport, from Microsoft desktops, to the MS E/S Hub, to MSOffice Groove, to MSLive, to MS CRM, integrating with backend MS SQL Server systems.

ODF was designed to be application and platform independent. MOOX was not. It’s time for ISO/IEC to speak, and by so doing, change the world.

~ge~