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In the Soviet Union the best indication of crisis was a Tschaikovsky Swan Lake TV program. While everyone was shocked about what happened in the National Committees, that they would go that far, Microsoft launched some entertainment:
MSDN has published the complete set of videos of the San Francisco Open XML developer workshop that was hosted by Mindjet in June. This was one of the series of workshops that we did in over 30 locations this spring, covering the content that was recently posted on OpenXMLDeveloper.org.
Obviously duck and cover was not the right thing to do! After all you made it in the Wallstreet Journal today, guys. Microsoft's chief evangelist has its say again:
The ISO voting on Open XML is delivering even more drama this week than I expected. In addition to the reality of what's going on, IBM and their friends are finding all sorts of imaginary dragons to slay, or at least to talk about.
I missed the Sweden point that Rob [Weir] was getting back to, but I assume it has something to do with the situation Jason Matusow covered today, involving a Microsoft employee who contacted a couple of Swedish partners about their participation in the Open XML vote.
I assume some people in the debate are aware that Sweden is special because here these events are taken very serious. However, we got similar reports from everywhere. So please, blog about everything you know, document it. We are deeply shocked about what is going on and whatever you find in the news or the <no>OOXML website is just a tip of an iceberg.
Best defense is counter-attack?
Did you know that IBM leads a conspiracy against Open XML? Open XML evangelist Doug understood that and uncovered their mysterious role. Isn't IBM known as the villain of evil? And what about poor old Rick Jelliffe? Wasn't the independent standard expert harassed by the Wikipedia crowds (victims of IBM hate propaganda) because Doug made up the proposal to pay Rick for the "factual correction" of the Open XML article? The guy who later became one of his key assets in the kill-all-the-comments campaign that is an essential part of a sound standardization process? After all the party who benefits from the proposed standards and submitted it should also review it in the national committees, right? And when Committees get to wrong conclusions it is required to modify an ISO standards vote with your business partners, right?
Face the facts. IBM wants to control ISO and promote their own products. They hate Open XML and spread their lies. They want to kill the wonderful standard. In order to prepare for this, we all must support Microsoft. Since the media is controlled by FFII, another IBM proxy, we should get our information from Doug and his fellow Microsoft bloggers.
… IBM has a hard time imagining a world in which people think for themselves, a world of chaotic freedom of choice and freedom of opinion. When you see bribery and scandal in every alliance between your foes, you're telling the world a lot about your view of the essence of collaboration and cooperation.
I've wondered before whether all these sleazy anti-Open XML tactics are working. Are IBM and their friends succeeding in creating FUD in the marketplace? It seems they are, in some cases.
IBM has set the stage for many more cries of foul, by misrepresenting various details of the ISO process. Just as they did during the contradiction comment period, IBM's strategy is to convince the public that some theoretical position is ISO or JTC 1 policy, and then when ISO follows its own rules they scream foul and leap up to defend the poor common man whose rights have been trampled by the process.
Read MS Doug full story for yourself and decide.
Doug wants Drama
The dust can't start settling too soon, but I suspect next week will be even worse when it comes to drama in the blogosphere.
Would you please make that happen? Doug expects your contributions. <no>OOXML can't do it alone. Document standards are "technical" stuff. An ISO process is complicated and technocratic. The conditions are not that good for raising public awareness. We should not let them get away with it. Because we understand as they do that an office document format is a key strategic tool of their market monopoly. They understand that ISO 26300 gets adopted by more and more governments and finally Microsoft will get no choice but to fully support the standard document format. We know that they are working on ODF support. Office Open XML ISO standardization is their sabotage. Nobody needs an ISO approval except Microsoft. If the specification and patent licensing was sufficient, market players could implement the ECMA standard or a published Microsoft specification. The sole purpose of the Open XML ISO standardization process is to undermine the multi-partisan ISO 26300 format, which is an open standard and leaves very few questions open when it comes to patent indemnification.
At least another 3-4 years the current binary legacy office formats from Microsoft will dominate the market. But when the switch to an XML office document format is made it should be an open ISO standard that is ready for the future and gets its XML right. Microsoft attempts to standardize its own OOXML format that serves virtually the same purpose than the existing ISO 26300 standard and their key argument is that OOXML includes all the proprietary slack from Microsoft and doing XML differently speeds up read/write operations. But they also made many unnecessary mistakes as the standard proposal had insufficient review. Open XML is not only their unilateral format, it is technically flawed. They were told so in the ECMA process but ignored all the comments from standard experts, because ECMA's mission was to define Ecma 376 as to be fully compatible with the Microsoft format. Then they fast-tracked the ECMA standard at ISO. It was FFII that wrote a letter and warned that Open XML was not ready for a fast-track process. I guess the technical debate is won now. Independent reviewers get a hard time to propose anything but "disapproval with comments" which means that the comments can be addressed in the ISO process and resolved. Irrespective of if they want the format to get adopted or not. Even Rick now suggests a "No with comments".
Our aim was to table all the issues of the format to get considered in the national committees. We didn't expect them to stuff Committees worldwide, upgrade banana republics to p-members etc. We didn't expect that Committee would exclude critics because of lack of chairs. We didn't expect them to find a professor to write a study about the benefits of multiple standards. We didn't expect ECMA officials to take an active and biased role in the responsible national committees. Etc. etc.
You know more Open XML standardization stories? Get them out! A German proverb says 'public awareness kills the king'. Let us find the dragons to slay, or at least to talk about.
