Details begin to surface about ISO's decision to give countries in search of justice... well, the finger [1, 2, 3]. ISO has come to the point where its goal is to give OOXML a thumbs-up and pretend that all that corruption never existed.

ISO seems to have done something similar to what Novell and Microsoft did in order to equip their marketing departments and Microsoft did to promote Windows Vista. They conduct surveys or polls that are hugely biased. It's almost as though they are rigged by design. Watch what they did this time around:

I have now received the actual voting results for the IEC vote, and an indecipherable screenshot of the ISO votes. I'll hope to add the ISO votes later on when I get more comprehensible information, but in the meantime, here are the IEC results.

In each case, the questions included in the ballot were the same:

a) Not to process the appeal any further

b) To process one or more of the appeals, which would require setting up of a conciliation panel

Rob Weir has seen this by now and he is angry because it's clear that they asked the wrong questions with the intention of cleaning up the mess and sweeping the abuse under a rug.

So the results in the SMB ballot are highly tainted by a poorly written ballot question, given to them by the Secretaries General, which clearly caused confusion among the SMB votes, and which had a material effect on the voting results. My analysis of IEC/SMB shows that like ISO/TMB's vote, the results are nearly equally divided, and IEC/SMB should hang their head in shame if they persist in denying a hearing to these four appeals because of ambiguous results from a poorly written, botched ballot.

Where have we heard this before?

"This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen."

--Tim Bray

ISO drips bias. Its goal was to defend its reputation through denial. It's a pattern [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and it's hugely appalling.

Meanwhile, the news gets filled with disinformation like this:

Posted by Zealot on 08/17/08 in Microsoft

[...]

Typically Microsoft, rather then settling on the readily available OpenDocument standard developed by Sun...

It is not developed by Sun! The critics, in this case an author called "Zealot", keep trying to put a company name on the face of ODF. It's disinformation, period. It's intended to make it seem like a battle between peers, as opposed to one company (Microsoft) against the entire world, which includes companies, independent developers, academic institutions, businesses and home users. OpenMalaysia once wrote: "what is the point is that we have collectively, globally, bore witness to an awesome display of power by a single corporation. Awesome. Ruthless, even.

To set the record straight on ODF, from an Indian perspective comes (fresh off the news):

On the other is the Open Document Format (ODF), supported by the likes of IBM, Sun Microsystems, Red Hat, Google, the Department of Information Technology (DIT), National Informatics Centre (NIC), CDAC, IIT-Mumbai and IIM-Ahmedabad.

Microsoft technologies are exclusionary and isolative by design (see this for details). In that respect, OOXML and .NET have something in common.

Java was cross-platform. Microsoft could not permit such 'abomination', so it tried to 'extend' so as to ruin it or make it Windows-reliant. Failing that, .NET, along with the illusion de Icaza helps create that .NET will work on other platforms (as a second-class citizen under the patent sword, of course), Microsoft tried to replace Java, somewhat of an analogical equivalent of ODF. ⬆

"That particular meeting was followed by an anonymous smear campaign against one of the TC members. A letter was faxed to the organization of the TC member in question, accusing the TC member in question of helping politicize the issue (which is, of course, untrue). I too had the dubious pleasure of hearing first hand how Microsoft attempted to remove me from the TC (they did not succeed, thanks to integrity and cojones of the organization I am affiliated with)."

"If this unethical behaviour by Microsoft was not sufficiently despicable, they did the unthinkable by involving politics in what should have been a technical evaluation of the standard by writing to the head of the Malaysian standards organization and getting its business partners to engage in a negative letter writing campaign to indicate lack of support of ODF in the Malaysian market. Every single negative letter on ODF received by the Malaysian standards organization was written either by Microsoft, or a Microsoft business partner or a Microsoft affiliated organization (Initiative for Software Choice and IASA)."

A Memo to Patrick Durusau