I am not mainly complaining on Microsoft

This article have some claims that are not completely correct.

First of all, I am not calling myself an Internet Pioneer. When I started work with Internet in Sweden (1987) other people already was working with it of course. What is true is that there where not many of us...

Secondly, the main problem is not with Microsoft, but with the way the standards organisation SiS has managed the situation. One can not in any standards organisation combine "open to everyone" and "voting". That scenario will always at some point in time be misused. Specifically should voting not be used in a situation where there is no consensus in the group, and the vote (in ISO in this case) does not have to be "Yes" or "No" (i.e. black and white).

This situation / broken process has now been used by Microsoft. I do not blame them for that. It is to some degree their responsibility to their shareholders.

The second problem is that OOXML is not a good standard. It has many flaws. Those flaws might be possible to fix, but as long as there are flaws in any standard so that no interoperability is possible, the documents are not ready.

So the in an ethical way wrong behaviour by Microsoft is to push something through an SDO that is not ready yet. Show a document that specifies OOXML, show an implementation of it (your own, like Word) that implements all features, and then a second implementation that do not share any code base, engineers etc that produce interoperable documents. That should be the measurement on whether a standard can be called a standard.

We are not there yet regarding OOXML, and the bad thing is that Microsoft and others that do push OOXML (for reasons I understand) manage to use loop holes in the SDO process.

It will be interesting to see what Sweden actually will vote in ISO on Sep 3. Do they have a spine strong enough to vote against the suggestion from the working group (that Microsoft stuffed)?

We'll see. Movie at 11.

/Patrik Fältström (look how well the register handle non-ascii ;-) )