Neelie Kroes clearly thinks its about choosing and making the right choice!

It looks like Ms Neelie Kroes, the Competition Commissioner for the European Union is in agreement with governments and their agencies for choosing proper open standards, as reported by the New York Times:

“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”

So its apparent that Malaysian agencies like MAMPU are also doing the right thing in adopting true open standards like ODF as their document file format, despite the fact that Microsoft Malaysia is constantly lobbying and interfering with MAMPU's decisions. The reaction from Microsoft's lobbying is certainly interesting. I think people are getting tired of their underhanded tactics, and false cries of "competition" and "fairness".

Ms Kroes continues to applaud the efforts of governments in making the right choices:

She praised the German city of Munich for using software based on open standards, along with the German Foreign Ministry and the Gendarmerie Nationale, France’s national police force.

Ms. Kroes, who is Dutch, encouraged the Dutch government and Parliament to continue moving toward use of open standards. EU agencies “must not rely on one vendor” and “must refuse to become locked into a particular technology — jeopardizing maintenance of full control over the information in its possession,” she said.

A policy by the European Commission adopted last year to promote the use of software products that support open standards “needs to be implemented with vigor,” she said.

It would be great if she could look into the running of the Netherlands National Body which is was forced into a "abstention" decision not because of any technical ineptitude to review OOXML, but because Microsoft held the 'veto' to find no full consensus amongst the TC members, as described here:

The result of this intensive process was that during the last meeting on the subject on August 16th 2007 in Delft - where the vote was to be cast - after a majority rejection of a proposal for an "Approval" a final proposal for a so called conditional approval (i.e.: a no vote that would turn into a yes vote if a number of reasonable and already determined conditions were met at the next stage) almost got unanimous support - from all but the local support branch of Microsoft. This isolated position caused the vote to fail and the Netherlands to automatically vote for an "Abstain".

Ms Kroes is of course no stranger to the wrath of the Microsoft machinery, having to battle with them for over 4 years with regards to Microsoft's bundling of their proprietary products, and their indignation in defying her orders. What is interesting is that governments and regulators are getting tired of Microsoft's antics and are starting to bite back.

Ms. Kroes did not name Microsoft in advance copies of her speech, but she made her meaning clear by referring to the only company in the history of EU antitrust enforcement that has been fined for refusing to comply with commission orders — a record held by Microsoft.

“The commission has never before had to issue two periodic penalty payments in a competition case,” she said.

I wonder when the Ministry of Domestic Trade will wake up and realise that they are practising uncompetitive behaviour by mandating that all PC's should be shipped with operating systems from a single vendor? Surely consumers should have a "choice"? Why isn't the Institute for Software Choice / CompTIA lobbying Dell to have more choice in their OS offerings for their desktops? Ubuntu/Fedora/openSolaris/FreeBSD? Why aren't those being offered?

What is ironic is that we are being told by Microsoft that their rushing of OOXML is due to the EU's request for more open standards in their products. Unfortunately in their haste to push OOXML through the ISO process, they caused such a mess in terms of their relationships with governments, agencies, national bodies and more importantly the media, that Microsoft is now being investigated on their attempts to play the ISO system for OOXML, as reported by The Wall Street Journal in February 2008.

So things aren't looking so swell for Microsoft. Their OOXML is currently in limbo, and will not be published on schedule, because 4 countries (Argentina, Brazil, India and South Africa) have appealed against the ISO stamp of "approval". Additionally, the final draft as promised by the BRM is still not available to National Bodies to review, 3 months on (directives clearly state that it should be available within 1 month). Unless of course they don't want to see any changes between the final draft and published text because of the restrictions imposed due to the "Fast Track" process?

Lets see how the Microsoft machinery reacts to this set of interesting news, and see how they spin in.  How much has this fiasco cost them? What did they get out of it? A chance to be more open? Can you see a change yet?

yk.

Comments

[Wouter van Vugt]

Yoon,

As a member of the Dutch ISO committee during the Open XML standardization I am not that amused with quotes about our procedings, which are inaccurately reflected here on your blog.
There was no consensus, period! It was not Microsoft, nor Sun or IBM who was the one party blocking any of the possible outcomes we discussed. I do have a personal opinion on the matter and why we reached the place where we are in the Netherlands, but that is not useful for the overal process. Please stop making insinuations otherwise. If your research consists of copying what is useful for your point of view from the web somewhere, I think you should find more useful things to do than to pollute the air with more 'I don't like Microsoft' sentiments. We have enough of those, thank you.

[Andre]

Yoon Kit, her speech is published. It was not so straight forward as it might appear to you. Her speech style is not spin resistant and provides trueism for everyone. The most important framing was provided by the event itself and its sponsors as well as the appearance of Mayor Ude of Munich. The audience was mostly lawyers and receptive lobbyists. Wouter, I guess the source M. Leenaars is regarded as credible by Yoon Kit. In Brussels and open standards policy in particular we have a burned soil situation. So far no change of practice can be observed except that Microsoft is getting less aggressive in matters of EU lobbying. They need to offer more or the machine they set into force would simply blow them away. It is the PR/lobby company workers in Brussels who tell you they "work for the evil side". If you don't care for your reputation you will face a backslash and as I said: when even representatives in Brussels share negative sentiments things went wrong in public affairs. No one else can be blamed for that. Speech: http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/08/317&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en

[Winter]

Wouter,

It doesn't seem quite appropriate for you to accuse Yoon Kit of "misrepresenting" the situation in the Dutch committee. I believe it was you that "updated" Brian Jones about your antagonism towards the other committee members. To quote from that blog (about the Dutch meeting):

"One thing that really struck me at the meeting was the open statement of the IBM representative of having been given a 'secret agena' for the meeting, I suspect some others to have received the same. The bad thing about this is that the debate no longer covers the merrits of Office Open XML, but instead is targetted by IBM to enlarge the market share of their own office productivity suite and accompanying language ODF. There have been some occurences that can be identified as at least worrying."

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/06/07/wouter-s-updates-on-the-iso-meetings.aspx

I get the distinct feeling that you were that lone MS representative that voted down the Dutch plan to submit their comments. But please, correct me if I am wrong. Or maybe there was another "Wouter" present?

Winter

[yoonkit]

Hi Wouter,

> I am not that amused with quotes about our procedings,
> which are inaccurately reflected here on your blog.

1) Perhaps you can identify which parts of my blog entry is inaccurate, and or better, indicate the inaccuracies of Mr Leenaars' statement.

But to proceed, Im glad we have you as a member of the Dutch committee to comment on this issue, because the only public account of this issue we have is via Mr Leenars statement.

2) Would you consider yourself as a pro-Microsoft party being that you are a MVP and have authored a book on OpenXML? [I hope, for yoursake that, you were properly paid for it because MS seems to love throwing that book around as freebies in expos.]
3) Is it fair to say that you have a certain commercial interest to have OOXML succeed through ISO? This is by no means an ad hominem attack on you; its just clarifying your vested interests prior to any discussion. Usually with good corporate governance, a person would abstain themselves to influence any decision if they have any form of commercial vested interests. They however can be invited to share their expert views when required. I trust you and your colleagues were similarly responsible to declare your positions as such?

4) As a responsible member of the Dutch committee, did you submit a technical evaluation of DIS? Did you find any errors which you thought you should submit as a correction? If not, of the thousands of technical changes which were identified by other NBs (available prior to the Sept 2007 vote), would you have adopted any of those technical shortcomings for the Netherlands to be concerned about?

5) Which "personal opinion" do you prefer: To identify and submit as many comments during the review period, or to limit the number of comments, only to be addressed in the future maintenance process?

6) You say that "There was no consensus, period! It was not Microsoft, nor Sun or IBM who was the one party blocking any of the possible outcomes we discussed". So you are categorically denying that Microsoft was the only one of the nine members that voted against the proposed conditional 'no' vote. Who did it then?

> If your research consists of copying what is useful for
> your point of view from the web somewhere

Unfortunately for you my research is not just from websites. I have spoken to a few people who were personally involved in the Dutch situation first hand, and they have relayed the same story which is consistent with Mr Leenars account. They were frustrated with the farcical "process" where one member denied the full concensus.

> to pollute the air with more 'I don't like Microsoft' sentiments.

Please try not to trivialise this matter. If you read what I have to say, this is not your standard "anti-Microsoft" spiel. Government agencies, private companies and national bodies are reacting against Microsoft's antics. We have been affected in some form and we urge Microsoft to stop. If they don't stop they face making themselves irrelevent in the future.

> We have enough of those, thank you.

So have we! and that is why we want the lobbying, interfering, and politicising to stop.

Oh btw, you still havent answered all the questions which I asked eons ago. [ http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2008/03/my-0006---perce.html ]. Perhaps we can do better with the 6 questions above this time, eh?

yk.

[Stephane Rodriguez]

Besides what yk says, I'd like to remind the audience that Wouter has absolutely no experience on implementing OOXML itself. What Wouter does as a living is implement applications on top of OOXML, usually these are small applications integrated in the Office suite (including sharepoint).

In other words, Wouter is by far the best Microsoft marketing person out there. Even Doug Mahugh aka Mr Bribery simply echoes Microsoft PR. Wouter goes much goes further, and ensures customers want to buy Office (client/server) products.

To say it loud and clear, this has nothing to do with OOXML itself. I don't understand why this guy has even a say on the subject. Actual implementers on the other hand should be given the exposure that they deserve. Not what Microsoft does, unless you put a positive spin. I remember when Doug Mahugh tried to bribe me when my earlier articles were helping him as an evangelist, and quickly moved back when I unleashed my thoughts about OOXML as an implementer of this embarassing thing.

As for his quickbook on OOXML, yes there is a certain level of hypocrisy here. I don't see him investing his own money to give books away for free. It is very hard not to imagine Microsoft paying him all along the way. And then all the wrong conclusions follow.

That tells a little bit about the so-called independent experts. Take Rick Jelliffe for instance, who has been flyed all over the world by Microsoft the last few years. When I asked him how much of OOXML he had implemented, his answer was quite eloquent : none.

Enough said.