This mandate transforms standards into economic weapons: if you can stop the competition’s technology from becoming a standard, you shut them out of the market (or force them to retool at great cost.)

It is not really all different than non-tariff barriers to trade.

If Rick Jelliffe has seen fit to publish my comment, I pointed that out as well, simply because I found that part absolutely hilarious.

It’s corny, but I really couldn’t help but think of that Darth Vader line in RTJ: “Perhaps I can find news ways to motivate them”.

I mean, whichever way you cut it and no matter how much you second guess yourself over how ridiculous this whole things is, it’s gone beyond a joke now.

Oh, okay, note that no one is allowed to disagree with a standard anymore, since it might be harmful to the competition.

I find Live.com’s attempt at spinning the IDC survey results to be greatly humorous; now there’s a section at the bottom noting that everyone who comes from here should read “an important article”, the contents of which talk about how IBM is out to shaft Microsoft because they want total control of the standards market. Uh, huh. Heard that one before.

It’s semi-official it seems – or at least MS seems to see it going down….

It failed to get the rubber stamp and now has to go through BRM etc to have any chance of making it. That press release makes me dizzy however….

Now to see if the BRM happens and laugh at ECMA’s and MS’s proposed solutions to the extremely detailed technical comments from the likes of Denmark and so on.

What great news :)

As to whether shame or other such pressures would prevent Microsoft from further stacking committees in the future, I see no evidence that this has or will have any effect.

See what Microsoft’s Tom Robertson says of the overall strategy:

“Most standards bodies are filled with ‘an old guard’ membership that needs rejuvenation, he said. He also likened Microsoft’s recruitment efforts to a voter registration drive.”

Who attends a BRM? Is it one delegate per NB? Or does the entire NB committee need to go? Because if there are sudden unannounced surges in memberships across several NBs the logistics for the room size and other accommodations may prove awkward to manage. I suppose there should be some sort of cut off date where notice of the number of members need to be sent. This may help someone to see surge in membership coming.

Sure, so then talk to the implementors and them you want this sooner.

I do think the OOo project thinks it a priority to support ODF 1.2 ASAP. And as Rob notes, there likely won’t be that big a time gap between final approval of the standard and implementation.

I’d prefer a good spec that sees multiple good implementations, than the fiasco that is OOXML.

Also, we have this thing in the Northern hemisphere called summer. Very little gets done in August when you are working with an international committee of volunteers.

As for ODF 1.2, aside from integrating the formula and metadata work, we still need to go through and address comments received via our public comment list since ODF 1.1.

Segedunum correctly points out the optimal strategy for Microsoft. Say hypothetically that the ballot results come out such that Microsoft is short by 5 P-member votes. So they need to get 5, any 5, P-members to change their No vote to Yes. They of course could change the standard to accommodate the concerns of those who voted No, but I don’t see that happening.

Another approach would be to get every NB that voted for OOXML to join at a P-member level, in order to bolster their numbers. Microsoft has already done this, but it may not be enough.

So the next easier approach would be to take 5 NB’s and have 20 Microsoft Gold Business Partners join the committees and turn them into pliant tools that will just vote Yes at the BRM without any changes being made the the standard. If they do that, and get their 2/3 vote, then they can merely vote to approve, vote to adjourn, and then finish with the BRM in 10 minutes. Aside from the expense of airfare, it is a painless solution.

This will probably give an apparent air that comments have been taken into account, when they simply haven’t.

It’s funny how Microsoft have seemingly synchronised this with all the impartial observers out there.

On a similar topic, OF and ODF1.2 are nearly done but according to the OoO roadmap we are going to have to wait until Oct 2008 to see OoO3.0 before the new standards are implemented. Is this long delay necessary? It seems that it would be tactically (in the battle for business desktops) a good thing to have the new standard supported ASAP. I for one would like to implement it in my company.

is the OpenFormula subcomittee moribund? Current status is unclear.

In the footnote to his story he says: “the stench of the four-paned beast is hard to wash off”. That might be a rather weak attempt at humour, but it seems to cut very close to the truth.

However the whole affair comes out in the end, I think this is going to be one of those events people will have long memories about.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070830155109351

Looks like it’s Slashdotting time?

My plan is to take that comment and show it to my boss when I have my annual performance review. It should be worth something.

Or maybe I’ll just rename my blog to “My Name is Legion” ?

But I do note that there has been a great sharing of information in the best open source tradition. We say it in the 30-day contradiction period on Groklaw, and that idea caught on. The US comments and mailing list archives were made public. The British did their work in a publicly visible wiki. Several NB’s took public comments and posted the comments that they received.

Of course, although I do not have a staff reviewing OOXML for me, I don’t live in a vacuum. I’ve benefited from the contributions and perspectives, both technical and strategic, of many, a small number of whom show up on my blog roll.

So when we look at the “irregularities” and the things that have gone vastly wrong in this process, we shouldn’t lose track of the things that have gone right. We may have need of them again someday.