Summary: Watching and learning how Microsoft uses its employees and lobbying arms (with intersections) to promote its interests

SOME months ago we mentioned Microsoft's Martin Bean, who turns out to be also involved in CompTIA, a Microsoft lobbying gun [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Among many other things, CompTIA played a role in the OOXML corruptions and there may be overlap with the BSA, which is also tied to Bill Gates' father.

Probably without awareness of all the above, one reader alerted us that "CompTIA manager buys house." The article actually says "Microsoft manager" because it's one of those cases where lobbyists wear multiple hats. For example, Jan van den Beld [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] was working at ECMA while also playing ball for CompTIA (and Microsoft of course).

Anyway, here is part of the new article about Martin Bean:

He has also presented to the U.S. Senate on behalf of the Technology Workforce Coalition, and moderated a town hall meeting for former President George W. Bush. In addition, he was also a board member of Jobs for America's Graduates, the chair of the CompTIA Public Policy Committee and the president of AIESEC International.

For a Microsoft employee, he sure does a lot of political things. No conflicts of interests there?

Mr. Bean has already invaded the Open University, which sort of vilified Free software shortly afterwards. This appointment may be part of Microsoft's crusade for influence inside education (getting children "addicted" while they are young, even at no cost). Martin Bean is connected to BECTA too because he is mentioned in related documents.

Another Microsoft manager who chalked Free software off the national education agenda recently quit the company. Amid all this, let's refer back to last month's post which asks and addresses the question, is Microsoft a "political movement"?

In other news of this kind, <No>OOXML has found out that Fraunhofer Fokus, which is funded by German taxpayers, may in fact be connected to Microsoft; for a fact, it sure serves Microsoft's corporate interests. The conclusion of the detailed analysis is:

The question is who will trust the research results of Fraunhofer Fokus? And why does the German tax payer invest in a research institution that sells out to companies across the Atlantic regardless of our national public interest in interoperability? For instance Fraunhofer Fokus applauded(!) the ISO adoption of Open XML.

For those who may be interested, we wrote about misbehaviour at the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]. ECT has not exactly forgotten the OOXML fiasco and it is being recited in LinuxInsider right now, even though they it tone down a little too much.

Looking ahead, standards organizations "need to sit down and admit there is a problem, and then decide if they want to help or hinder industry progress," Mack said.

"I'm hoping the ISO recovers from this," he added. "They have been publicly humiliated by the debacle but refuse to admit anything went wrong. Monty Python's 'Black Knight' imitation would actually be amusing if the stakes weren't so high."

ECT is not gutsy enough to say the truth. Contrariwise, another Microsoft lobbying arm, ACT [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], is now being accused by Sun's Simon Phipps, who says that "ACT are pretty active advocates of all that makes FOSS difficult or impossible." Phipps packs it up with the usual IBM-hostile venom.⬆

"Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent."

--Napoleon Bonaparte