Is it starting to go “Pete Tong” for Microsoft?
With only a couple of days to go before the international standards bodies have to declare their votes in the Ecma-376 standardisation process, the blogosphere is really hotting up with all sorts of news and scandal:
- According to this, Sweden has declared it’s vote illegal and will now abstain due to “voting irregularities”. (Yeah, right…)
- New Zealand and India have both said “NO”,
- France should be saying “non” (but it might end up abstaining) after a bit of a fracas,
- In Hungary, the Standards Institution is to reconsider its vote,
- The Brazillians have said no,
- The Swedish debarcle may impact the Danish vote too,
- Hot off the blog – Norway says NO,
It is all getting quite exciting really – better than an episode of “Heros”, but I suspect that Microsoft my well end up with enough votes to scrape through by the rather unusual changes occurring to the status of many small and normally benign countries’ standards bodies…
I’d love to know what the BSi are going to do???
More later I’m sure 😉
Update 01/09/07 – I just found this short analysis of the OOXML v ODF debate from The Brain Wrecked Tech and thought it to be very clear, concise, lucid and worth linking too.
Look for the BSi to hold its own. They take standards extremely seriously. And Alex Brown has been asked to Govern the Ballot Resolution Meetings (Feb ’08)…a good choice it looks like.
Thanks for the comment Sam,
We mentioned that Alex Brown was to chair the BRM and I agree with you. The BSi have – historically at least – been very scrupulous with their standards and they did after all release a huge list of comments on ooxml (http://www.xmlopen.org/ooxml-wiki/index.php/DIS_29500_Comments) quite some time ago, so it would look rather strange if their vote was inconsistent.