Buy, Cheat, Steal, and Lie: The OOXML Story
,----[ Quote ]
| A 2007 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit may end
| up coming back to haunt Microsoft in their ongoing U.S. antitrust battle. The
| case revolved around claims by Broadcom that Qualcomm had deliberately
| included its patents in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System
| standard in order to create a monopoly for its products. The appeals court
| held that if a company acts deceptively to gain adoption of a standard that
| then results in a monopoly to their advantage, they can be held to have
| violated anti-trust laws, irrespective of their right to determine the use of
| their patents. Interestingly enough, the Court of Appeals ruling relies on a
| Federal Trade Commission ruling which in turn relied on — drumroll, please —
| United States v. Microsoft, the very case that put MS under supervision in
| the first place.
|
| All we can say is, we hope that with this many available avenues, something
| is done to rectify the farce acted out over the last several months.
`----
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/buy-cheat-steal-and-lie-ooxml-story
Here's what Microsoft does to documents:
Death of Digital Media
,----[ Quote ]
| A storage device can become obsolete in less than two years, as this timeline
| shows
|
| Death of Digital Media: Jaz! Clik! Sparq! In no time, some of these storage
| devices leaped into oblivion. The media may survive, but will anyone be able
| to read them?
`----
http://spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6107
Related:
EC probes OOXML standards-setting process
,----[ Quote ]
| A spokesman for the European Commissioner for Competition, Neelie Kroes, told
| The Register that regulators were continuing to scrutinise interoperability
| issues related to Microsoft’s products following complaints from the
| Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS) group.
|
| As part of that process, the EC formally contacted a number of national
| standards bodies, including the Norwegian Standards Institute (NSI),
| requesting more details about possible irregularities in the OOXML
| standardisation process.
|
| [...]
|
| “It must be stressed that it is not the Commission's intention to influence
| the outcome of this process, but the Commission considers it essential to
| ensure that European competition law is not violated in the course of the
| standard setting process,” he said in an email to El Reg.
|
| In January the EC began formal anti-trust probes against Microsoft in two
| cases where it was alleged that the multinational firm had abused its strong
| market position. As part of the investigation into the first case, the
| Commission said that it would scrutinise OOXML on the grounds that the
| specification doesn't work with those of competitors.
`----
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/04/ooxml_ec_investigation_iso/
Could an Appeal Derail OOXML?
,----[ Quote ]
| Meanwhile, the normal ISO process means that OOXML will not become an
| official standard until at least the two-month waiting period runs out.
`----
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3738336
Martin Bryan: we are getting “standardization by corporation”
,----[ Quote ]
| A November informative report of Martin Bryan, Convenor, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34
| WG1 highlights the fallout of the ECMA-376 fast-track process for ISO. He
| says he is 'glad to be retiring before the situation becomes impossible'
|
| [...]
|
| In what is an astonishingly outspoken report, Martin Bryan, Convenor, ISO/IEC
| JTC1/SC34 WG1 has given us insight into the total mess that Microsoft/ECMA
| have caused during their scandalous, underhand and unremitting attempts to
| get - what is a very poorly written specification {i.e. DIS 29500 aka OOXML,
| AR} - approved as an ISO standard. …
`----
http://www.noooxml.org/forum/t-30107/martin-bryan:we-are-getting-standardization-by-corporation
Dysfunctional ISO - Courtesy of Microsoft
http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2007/12/dysfunctional-iso-courtesy-of-microsoft.html
Microsoft accused of stacking ISO committee
,----[ Quote
| In a memo sent following his last meeting as head of the working group on
| WG1, which is handling Microsoft’s application to make the Word format an ISO
| standard as ECMA 376, outgoing Governor Martin Bryan (above), an expert on
| SGML and XML, accused the company of stacking his group.
`----
http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=1777
EU Initiates Investigation Against Microsoft OOXML Push
,----[ Quote ]
| But with Steve Ballmer taking over as CEO, there was supposed to be a kinder,
| gentler Microsoft - one that would play nicely with its competitors. When
| antitrust regulators in turn challenged this new Microsoft, it issued not
| challenges to fight to the end to prove that it had done nothing illegal, but
| statements promising to "cooperate fully."
|
| But at the same time, Microsoft is still a tough competitor. As Microsoft's
| Director of Corporate Standards Jason Matusow famously warned at his blog
| last year:
|
| Make no mistake; all parties are looking at the full picture to find
| strategies that will result in the outcome they desire. Provided - of
| course - that they do so within the context of the rules that apply to
| the process, this is exactly what one should expect to happen. It is
| going to be a very interesting next few months.
|
| Indeed, the months that followed proved to be interesting indeed. Microsoft
| said that some of its employees became over zealous, most flagrantly in
| Sweden, where marketing assists were promised to several business partners as
| incentives to join the national standards committee and vote for OOXM.
`----
http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20080208082501776
EU Commission Investigating Microsoft's MSOOXML Push
,----[ Quote ]
| I hope they think to investigate the smear campaigns that seem to always
| happen to anyone on the other side from Microsoft. What happened to Peter
| Quinn was by no means unique.
`----
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20080208151410252
Corrupt countries were more likely to support the OOXML document format
,----[ Quote ]
| Is this just a random coincidence? The median of the CPI index of the above
| mentioned 70 countries is 3.95. Of the most corrupted half (CPI index less
| than 3.95) 23 or 77% voted for approval (approval or approval with comments)
| and 7 or 23% for disapproval; 5 abstained. Of the least corrupted half (CPI
| index more than 3.95) 13 or 54% voted for approval and 11 or 46% voted for
| disapproval; 11 abstained - see the table below.
`----
http://www.effi.org/blog/kai-2007-09-05.en.html
Microsoft accused of more OOXML standards fiddling
,----[ Quote ]
| However the 11 new countries are refusing to say how they will vote. These
| include Cote d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Ecuador, Jamaica, Lebanon, Malta, Pakistan,
| Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Uruguay and Venezuela. Most people seem to think
| that these have been put there by Vole to make sure the standard gets pushed
| through.
`----
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=42106
|
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