Front-page: Microsoft trying to reinterpret ISO voting rules?

The voting form G18 is mentioning the following:

If a national body votes affirmatively, it shall not submit comments. If a national body finds the DIS unacceptable, it shall vote negatively and state the technical reasons.

Microsoft is trying to take the voting rules as literally written in section 9.8 of the JTC1 directives:

Approval of the technical content of the DIS as presented (editorial or other comments may be appended);

and they are trying to argue that "other comments" can be technical comments.

Unfortunately, as stated in Australia Standards meeting, a vote of "Approval with technical comments" is like an "Approval with a Christmas card". No value, no any warranty that the serious problems that are in the specification will be solved anytime.

The wording "editorial or other comments" implies that technical comments *are* indeed possible even with a "yes" vote. The phrase would otherwise have been "editorial or general comments". This might be a mistake, but the rules, as they are written, do allow it. Having said that, I seriously don't think that "Yes with hundreds of technical comments" is a good way to go for any voting organization who seriously wishes those technical comments to be addressed.

Once again, we see how Microsoft is playing the system in ways which were never intended. It seems nobody ever considered the possibility of a hostile takeover of ISO committees. I guess nobody anticipated that there would be a commercial reason to try to force a bad standard through the system. It is time to rethink the quality assurance of the review process and the rules of the voting system to prevent these things from happening again, otherwise we will see the reputation and credibility of ISO being destroyed by Microsoft's ugly standards pushing. If we do not stop this attempt dead in its tracks now and resubmit OOXML to ECMA for them to try to get it right, we will see a number of other bad and immature ideas being forced through ISO. The XPS proposal from Microsoft is on its way through ECMA, and if we need to make sure it will not be pushed through ECMA in a state as bad as that of OOXML.

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