The Wall Street Journal: Microsoft and Its Rivals Take ‘Office’
Politics Global
“Ente Nazionale Italiano di Unificazione, or UNI, Italy’s
national standard-setting body, handles such matters as drawing up
specifications for water tanks and establishing the proper diameter
of nuts and bolts. Its work rarely draws a crowd.“That changed this spring when a UNI subcommittee began to
consider a bid by Microsoft Corp. to win its support for the file
format used in new versions of its ubiquitous Office software…
Within months, a technical committee of some half-dozen members
ballooned to no fewer than 85 Italians…”
Reuters: Critics Urge Rejection of Microsoft “Open” Format
“‘More parallel standards makes for better standards. It’s good
not to decide for a single standard too soon,’ Michael Groezinger,
Microsoft’s chief technology officer in Germany, told Reuters in an
interview.“He declined to speculate on the outcome of the ISO vote but
welcomed last week’s decision of the German Institute for
Standardisation–an ISO member–to give Open XML a conditional
‘yes’ vote…”
<NO>OOXML: Hungarian Standards Institution to Reconsider
Its Vote on OOXML
[ Thanks to trey for
this link. ]
“Mr János Kóka, Minister of Economy and Transport,
has sent a mail to György Pónyai, General Director of
Hungarian Standards Institution (HSI), about its the Hungarian vote
on OOXML issue. In this mail the minister informed the director,
that the IBM Magyarországi Kft (the Hungarian subsidiary of
IBM) signed concerns about the way how the Hungarian vote was
decided on the OOXML issue (draft of ISO/IEC DIS 25900 standard) on
the meeting of the Committee on 25th June 2007…”
Linux Journal: The Joy of OOXML
“For most of us, file formats are right up there with printer
drivers in terms of fun. Certainly, they’re important, but not
something you’d look to for excitement. And yet that is precisely
what the battle between the OpenDocument Format and Microsoft’s
OOXML is providing. And I’m not just talking about the dry,
intellectual excitement derived from comparing well-formed XML
tags: this is a no holds barred, down-and-dirty mano a mano fight
over the soul of document standards.“Some of this stuff is downright hilarious…”
Matusow’s Blog: Open XML–The Vote in Sweden
“Microsoft encouraged partners to participate in Sweden:
“An employee in Sweden sent an email to 2 partners that was
inconsistent with company policy. When he realized what he had
done, he did the right thing by immediately reaching out to the two
partners to address the situation. He contacted them by phone and
email letting them know that they should disregard the mail…”