A wealth of commentary on the subjects of standards, OOXML, ODF, and related topics. Each article available in pdf.

"...Microsoft is too big to fail, but in the end it will likely become another AOL - a company that tried to create a walled "web-like" partition and failed, and that is now becoming increasingly irrelevant as a consequence...

Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking at Tsinghua University in Beijing at an IBM-sponsored conference attended by over 200 government officials, business leaders, and academicians to discuss the confluence of three important topics: open standards, innovation, and intellectual property policy.

In the past, ITWire has been less than flattering over Microsoft’s OpenXML document format. Make no mistake, an open file format is definitely a must-have. Nevertheless, it exists so let’s be pragmatic: OpenXML can greatly bridge the gap between Windows and Linux. In fact, it can open up whole new opportunities for Linux coders to produce documents in a Microsoft-friendly format.

Late last month, evidence emerged indicating that Microsoft has used financial incentives to influence the outcome of Office Open XML (OOXML) fast-track approval in various national standards bodies. Although ISO ended up voting against fast-track approval for OOXML, the company's efforts have created doubts about the reliability of the standards process.

Norbort Bollow, an XML standards specialist from Switzerland, takes action. He participated in the Swiss 'Open XML' review process (their comments) but technical review was obstructed by political interference and commercial interests. Today he started OpenISO.org.

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.

China has unanimously voted "no, with comments" on OOXML. As I had noted in an earlier blog entry, China had been signalling some displeasure with Microsoft and OOXML in recent weeks, via Xinhua, the official government news agency, so this is not totally a surprise.