A few month’s back I noted Microsoft’s failure to get approval for their Open Office XML standard by a sub-group of the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS). The plot thickens:
During the voting period, more and more countries joined SC 34, the committee within ISO/IEC’s Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC1) that addresses document formats, at the Observer (O) level. Then, in the final weeks and days before the voting closed, many of these new members as well as many longer term members suddenly upgraded their status to Principal ((P) membership, thereby gaining greater influence in the final vote under the complex rules under which the committee operates.
The countries in question were for example, Malta, Venezuela, Pakistan, Poland, Egypt, Lebanon, New Zealand, South Africa, Romania, Sri Lanka and Chile. So good to see them taking interest. There is a problem though, none of them is taking an interest to maintain even the minimal obligations of their membership.
…since the OOXML ballot closed on September 2, not a single ballot has received enough votes to count in this important committee. Why? Because the last minute arrivals to SC 34 are not bothering to vote.
It seems that those countries took extraordinary interest in Microsoft OOXML and once the vote failed, there is nothing else that motivates them. I wonder what that means?
The resulting gridlock of this committee was as predictable as it is unfortunate. The extraordinarily large number of upgrades in the final months, and particularly in the final days, therefore seemed attributable not to an abiding investment and interest in the work of SC 34, but in the outcome of a single standards vote. That conclusion is now certain, given the voting performance of the upgraded members since they cast their votes on OOXML.
Since the recent influx of new P-members to our committee, not a single ballot has had a sufficient number of responses to be considered.
So if anybody tells me that Microsoft is playing fair, I don’t think I will listen until they can beat this explanation:
1. committee to vote on important matter which is strategic to large company
2. committee suddenly gets packed with yes-men, one cannot imagine who’s funding them
3. committee vote fails anyway — but is a close-run thing
4. yes-men all spontaneously get bored and walk away from their commitments
5. committee becomes dead in water due to voting procedure requiring input from now-vanished yes-men
6. committee dies?
