“I have long maintained that technology standardization is
commercial diplomacy and the purpose of individual participants (as
with all diplomats) is to expand one’s area of economic influence
while defending sovereign territory. This week a lot of people are
gathering in Geneva for the ISO ballot resolution meeting for
Office Open XML (OOXML), Microsoft’s Office product specification.
The debate no doubt will be contentious.“Microsoft had a perfect opportunity to participate in the Open
Document Format (ODF) standard’s development at OASIS. They ignored
that opportunity…”