Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft's Death Row of Standards and Why W3C Must Be Careful

"We've got to put a lot of money into changing behavior."

--Bill Gates



A presentation from an IBM employee in Europe has just been shared a little more publicly. It describes the serious problems ISO will be facing after the countless OOXML scandals that worked in Microsoft's favour.

Not all standards development organizations are the same. Looking forward, I believe that competition between standards organizations will increase and established de jure organizations will be further challenged. In this context, quality will become a differentiator between standards organizations and, just as it is true in the corporate world, standards organizations that do not strive to improve will become irrelevant over time.

[...]

Ultimately, reliance on traditional de jure standards will probably decrease. In the meanwhile, if they care to survive standards development organizations will need to start a serious introspection of their processes and look to adopt some of the principles set by exemplary organizations such as W3C.

While no organization is perfect and there always is room for improvement, W3C has indeed set itself apart from the pack by showing the way to much greater quality and openness for the benefit of all.


ISO standards for saleJust a couple of days ago we warned that Microsoft is once again poisoning W3C, at least on the face of it. Wilson is at it again, causing problems and upsetting Microsoft's rivals from the insides of the W3C. This has a long history [1, 2, 3] and as stressed many times before, Microsoft hopes to render W3C obsolete by introducing XAML and making it widespread to the point where all Web pages are proprietary and by no means controlled or policed by W3C guidelines [1, 2, 3, 4]. This overrides (X)HTML, which is vendor-independent.

If there was anything to learn from ISO's sellout it is that having Microsoft near a standards committee is a recipe for trouble. ISO has yet to go under assault, potentially effective owing to the legal system. Microsoft's OOXML is not an ISO standard before June, if ever.

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