451 CAOS Theory 
A blog for the enterprise open source community
A slight difference of opinion
Matthew Aslett, March 3, 2008 @ 6:56 am ETThe Ballot Resolution Meeting to discuss the technical comments arising from the fast track process to have Microsoft’s Office Open XML formats accepted as an ISO standard was held last week in Geneva. The object of the BRM is to seek consensus on potential modifications. Opinion is divided as to whether the meeting was a success, however:
(I have noted affiliations in order to provide clarity, but it should be noted that the comments of individuals do not necessarily represent the views of their employers)
“The DIS 29500 ballot resolution meeting (BRM) finished up in Geneva today and was an unqualified success by any measure.”
Jason Matusow, Microsoft senior director of interoperability.
“There were many technical changes the delegates made to really get consensus on some of the more challenging issues, but all of these passed overwhelmingly once they were updated. The process really worked (it was very cool).”
Brian Jones, Microsoft Office program manager.
“Only a very small percentage of the proposed dispositions were discussed in detail, amended and approved by the delegations in attendance at the BRM, indicating the inability of OOXML to be adequately addressed within the ‘Fast Track’ process.”
Andy Updegrove, Consortiuminfo.org
“It was a failure of the Fast Track process, and Ecma for choosing it. It should have been obvious to the administrators that submitting a 6000+ page document which failed the contradiction period, the 5 month ballot vote and poor resolution dispositions, should be pulled from the process. It should have been blatantly obvious that if you force National Bodies to contribute in the BRM and end up not deliberating on over 80% of their concerns, you will make a lot of people very unhappy.”
Yoon Kit, Open Malaysia.
“The process was complete, utter, unadulterated bullshit. I’m not an ISO expert, but whatever their ‘Fast Track’ process was designed for, it sure wasn’t this. You just can’t revise six thousand pages of deeply complex specification-ware in the time that was provided for the process… This was horrible, egregious, process abuse and ISO should hang their heads in shame for allowing it to happen. Their reputation, in my eyes, is in tatters.”
Tim Bray, director of web technologies, Sun.
“Eighty percent of the changes were not discussed. It’s like if you had a massive software project and 80% of it was not run through QA.
It’s a big problem. I’ve never seen anything like this, and I’ve been doing this for 25 years.”
Frank Farance, head of the U.S. delegation.
“80%+ of the resolutions of the BRM were resolved by a ballot, without discussion, without taking into account any dissenting views, without reconciling any arguments. Indeed, there was not any opportunity to even raise an objection to an issue decided by the ballot. Many of the issues were decided in 6-5 or 7-6 split votes, with no discussion. How can that be said to be a consensus? This is an utter failure to follow the cardinal principles of JTC1 process.”
Rob Weir, IBM performance architect.
“As it stands today, the BRM has failed -failed to work, failed to impress, failed to create consensus and failed to succeed. Rules that were not part of the existing JTC-1 corpus had to be invented to come up with the astounding result of 6 countries approving the bulk voting versus 4 countries formally disapproving them, 18 others abstaining, while four others even refusing to vote as a way to show their complete disapproval of the way the BRM was being handled.”
Charles Schulz, Ars Aperta.
Admittedly I am quoting selectively, but you have to wonder whether a ‘standard’ that has been through a process that divides opinion so much is worthy of the title, whatever the result. The most damning indictment, in my personal view, comes again from Yoon Kit of the Malaysian delegation:
“We eventually found out that if any changes affected current implementations it would certainly be rejected. This seriously compromised any elegant solutions, and it forced us to be mindful of the ‘existing corpus of documents’ in the wild. I personally don’t believe that that should be our problem, but there was a large and vocal voting bloc which would oppose any changes to the spec which would ‘break’ Ecma 376. This was why appeasing Ecma had to happen. Even though they rushed their Ecma International Standard, and Microsoft took the risk in shipping Microsoft Office 2007 last year, we now have to bear the burden of having to support its limitations.”
UPDATE – Jason Matusow has posted a couple of articles noting the positive views of the Danish and Norwegian delegations, as well as from Rick Jeliffe of the Australian delegation, while Andy Updegrove is constantly updating his post, most recently with information from the Greek delegation. For further details of both sides of the story, stay tuned to those blogs. – UPDATE
Comments (9) Categories: Software
Matthew, it just proves how useless any IT standards process is. The market will decide as it always has.
I have to disagree with you. Of course, if you have a single party as powerful as Microsoft that is willing to go any length (and I mean any) to get “their” standard as a an ISO standard (probably braking the whole standard setting process as a whole), you can not expect good things to come out of it.
[...] Matthew Aslett of The 451 Group comments about the Geneva BRM. He is probably confused as much as I am, but he reports a number of opinions (including those that I’ve mentioned in my previous post). I point out Matthew’s last two paragraphs: Admittedly I am quoting selectively, but you have to wonder whether a “standard” that has been through a process that divides opinion so much is worthy of the title, whatever the result. The most damning indictment, in my personal view, comes from Yoon Kit of the Malaysian delegation: [...]
I’m a little confused about where this 80% number is from. There were somewhere between 3,500 and 900 proposed changes, depending on who’s counting. Twenty or thirty changes were approved (apparently almost every change that was discussed was eventually approved). Taking the best possible number in each case, that would be 30 out of 900 which is only 3% of comments dealt with and 97% not even discussed, according to my calculator. What am I missing?
According to Andy Updegrove “After several days, only about 20 [Updated: 20 to 30] dispositions had been thoroughly discussed and voted upon. Approximately 200 dispositions in the nature of minor editorial corrections (misplaced commas and the like) were also adopted.” The 80% is the rest.
I recently became a Microsoft shareholder, and I feel much better now. At least Microsoft knows how to outwit unsuspecting governments, and fleece their populi. So stop whining, and START PAYING RENT.
Good point well made. I for one welcome our new office format overlords.
[...] Here is Matt Aslett’s take on the spin from Microsoft, which leads to confusion (by design). [...]
I think that at the end of the day, opinions are just worth… nothing, must try to rely on facts, for example that the BRM was, indeed, a failure if you use “actual work done” as a metric.