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1. Comment - Microsoft Reports Victory in Preliminary ISO Ballot for Office Open XML

   (Sep 5, 2007 - 8:06 PM)

   OOXML already has fast-track status. The vote was not about that. This vote was one step in the fast-track process. If there had been a 2/3 majority of P-voters voting "yes" (with or without comments would not matter) AND less than 1/4 of all voters (P, O and plain members) voting "no" (with or without comments) then OOXML would be through the fast-track process and would be a standard. In every case a vote of "abstention" is not counted, signaling that a member body has taken some time to look over the proposal but did not reach a consensus for whatever reason.
   
   The only relevance of a vote with comments is that "no with comments" is counted as a "no" vote but the comments are supposed to be addressed in the next stage, the Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM), and if comments can be resolved to a voter's satisfaction the vote can be changed to a "yes". Realize that the standards process is not supposed to be as political as this one has become. A "no" vote is supposed to be accompanied by a list of technical objections that can be worked through until the standard really does satisfy everyone. Unless of course a technical objection just can't be solved, in which case the standard might not make it through the final stage.
   
   The victory proclaimed by the anti-OOXML-as-standard crowd is that this vote did not secure the standard. The victory claimed by Microsoft in their weirdly spun press release is that OOXML was not so unanimously voted down that ISO would not bother with going on to the next step. But that was never a possibility. Nobody credible on the anti-OOXML side, including Andy, has written an epitaph. This vote was a narrow squeak through that allows the final battle to be fought between now and February.
   
   In terms of numbers in the press release, Microsoft played some very strange games. 74% counts the number of "yes" votes (with or without comments) of all members (P, O, and plain member) who did not vote abstention. What is strange is that those votes only count for the second of the criteria, in which there must be less than 25% "no" votes. 18 out of 69 meant 26% "no" votes, therefore not passing. The number Microsoft did not mention was the approx 53% of the non-abstaining P-votes that were "yes", well below the required 2/3 for that.
   
   Microsoft's emphasis on "yes with comments" and their urging people to vote that way if they have concerns was also misleading. The only comments that are formally recognized are those that accompany a "no" vote, as those comments are addressed at the BRM to give the voter an opportunity to be satisfied and switch to a "yes".
   
   Even stranger was the press releases claim that the 51 "yes" votes compare favorably with the 31 "yes" votes that the ODF standard got and the 15 that PDF-A got at this stage of the vote. What they neglect to mention was that ODF and PDF-A votes were both unanimous approvals with no dissenting comments substantive enough to require a BRM to be scheduled. The 51 votes for OOXML were really just 22 if you count just the P-voters, and were only 53% of the P-voters.
   
   "the part I disagree with, to answer your question, is the part where you proclaimed the vote a failure and wrote its epitaph"
   
   I looked over Andy's blog posting about the vote and could find no epitaph for OOXML. He did declare the failure of the vote to pass, something very different and demonstrably true:
   
   "I projected that the OOXML vote in ISO/IEC JTC1 would fail [...] the vote failed both tests for approval"
   
   In the same article Andy has a section on what are the next steps in which he quotes the ISO about scheduling the Ballot Resolution Meeting to attempt to meet the objections submitted in the "no, with comments" to attempt to turn them into yes votes.
   
   OOXML as a fast-track standard is not dead. The comments are a big hurdle for it to overcome. In fact, if all the comments were really addressed, all but the most rabid anti-OOXML diehard would probably really not have an objection to the standard. The fear of the "anti-OOXML" forces is that Microsoft will succeed in their tactics of packing committees with supporters and otherwise subverting the consensus process to get enough "no" votes switched without fully addressing some very basic concerns that are lurking within the thousands of comments that have been submitted for resolution.