How “Ignorant of Standards” Was Microsoft Really?

“Regular readers will notice that I’ve been woefully silent the
last few weeks, at first due to having too many irons in the fire,
and for the last ten days due to being on a family vacation abroad,
returning not till July 2. As a result, I’ve been not only behind
on blogging, but also on keeping up with the news while limited
primarily to Blackberry access since I left. But I thought that it
might be useful to take a break and share the ‘Huh?!?’ I
experienced when I stumbled across this article by Andrew Donoghue
at ZDNet while briefly enjoying an island of laptop connectivity in
a hotel lobby in Florence. The article is titled, ‘Microsoft admits
to standards ignorance pre-OOMXL’ and is based on remarks by
Microsoft national technology officer Stuart McKee. Even more
incredibly, it bears the following subtitle:

“Microsoft has admitted that, despite being one of the dominant
names in IT for over 30 years, it had little or no experience or
expertise around software standards until the company was mid-way
through the process of getting Office Open XML approved by the
International Organization for Standardization…”

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