We experienced some downtime earlier, due to an overwhelming load on the server. This hopefully won't happen again, especially at this crucial time.
Let's just go very quickly at the overlooked facts which Microsoft and its press are less than keen on informing you of.
Now that OOXML has been shoved through, (and if you are new to the story, here's a very complete and succinct history of what happened by James Hogarth on Tideway), we find it cut and bleeding on the other side. What about appeals of the travesty? There is an appeal process, although you may have noticed that Standards Norge's decision was objected to elsewhere. Perhaps folks have gotten the idea that ISO is a bit tilted at the moment.
If any national standards organizations do make appeals to the Joint Technical Committee of ISO (JTC1) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) that worked on the draft, then Microsoft may have to wait several months longer while the appeal is heard, according to Section 11 of the ISO/IEC JTC1 Directives.
Now that Office Open XML (OOXML) has been certified as an ISO standard, there is a possibility that the vote leading to that result will be challenged. It seems Microsoft is already counting on it.
Microsoft's ISO win may worsen its antitrust woes
Microsoft may have won a year-long quest to make its OOXML (Office Open XML) document format an ISO-recognized international standard, but claims of foul play in the voting process may come back to haunt the software giant when the European Commission concludes its latest antitrust investigation of Microsoft's business practices.
Minister ignored objections
According to Open Malaysia, the Malaysian Industrial Standards Committee for IT (ISC-G) took a vote on Mar. 27 to decide the country's stance on the OOXML-ISO vote, with 13 disapprovals, five abstentions and only three approvals.
By eventually taking the decision to abstain in the OOXML ISO ballot, Maximus Ongkili, who is two weeks into the job as Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation--following the country's Mar. 8 general elections--appeared to have ignored the ISC-G's majority "disapprove" vote.
The British Standards Institution (BSI) has always been one of those iconic central points of reference in British life – a kind of Big Ben for standards. But it's a little hard to square that image – perhaps hopelessly outdated – with the BSI's recent decision to vote in favour of Microsoft's OOXML document standard.
You don't have to take my word for this cognitive dissonance. Someone rather more qualified than me to comment on the process to produce the final version of the proposed standard is Tim Bray. He's generally credited with being one of the fathers of XML, which of course lies at the heart of OOXML. It's true he's currently employed by Sun, the main backer of the rival ODF standard, and so potentially biased, but I don't think anybody has ever impugned his integrity because of that.
Having participated within the responsible technical committee of the Swiss Association for Standardization and considering the decision-making process that has been used to be unsatisfactory, I find it interesting to look at how things have been handled in other countries, in order to see what can be learned from that. I plan to focus my attention in this regard on countries where the primary language is German, English or French, so that I will be able to understand any relevant documents which might become available to the public or personally to me.