Microsoft Stacks Committee, Barely Misses Vote on OOXML
This one’s not so much on a piece of literature, but a standard that goes into how our writing is saved.
According to Rob Weir Microsoft tried pulling some 11th hour committee stacking to approve their OOXML format for the United States and just barely failed. Roughly two meetings before the committee was set to vote on OOXML acceptance as a standard, roughly 16 new companies joined the committee of 7 members, all of them Microsoft shills.
Out of the original 7, only Microsoft itself voted for acceptance of the standard. Out of the late joining companies, nearly all voted to accept Microsofts offering verbatim.
Maybe other software companies should monitor these things a little more closely in the future, to make sure we’re not allowing MS to railroad their crap in as “standard” when it’s not qualified or ready. As users, we’ve got a vested interest in there only being mature and properly inter operable standards. RobWeir.com