Rob Weir has discovered something so awful about the maintenance of MXOOXML, should it become an ISO standard, I wanted to make sure everyone knows about it, and then I have some projects to tell you about that are trying to respond to Microsoft's gaming of the ISO approval process.

In Weir's article, " Bait and Switch", he informs us that Microsoft is going back on public promises regarding control of the standard, should it be approved, promises which Ecma echoed [PDF]. You can't take your eyes off Microsoft for even a minute, can you?

Now, I'm a simple soul, so I could well be missing something, but it looks to me like at February's meeting, any unresolved technical issues can have Microsoft promising to fix the issue, hence winning approval, after which it, through, Ecma, controls how and when it is deemed "fixed", since voting is by rubber stamp Ecma.

Uh oh.

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Also:

Microsoft’s strong-arming of the ISO process regarding Open XML, the proprietary format of Microsoft Office, may be destroying its legitimacy. (Picture from the IS-Thought Group.)

In a memo sent following his last meeting as head of the working group on WG1, which is handling Microsoft’s application to make the Word format an ISO standard as ECMA 376, outgoing Governor Martin Bryan (above), an expert on SGML and XML, accused the company of stacking his group.

Microsoft accused of stacking ISO committee