Germany is voting “YES” on DIS 29500 at ISO. The relevant committee was given by DIN only the choice between “YES” and “ABSTAIN” on DIS 29500, since changing from “YES with comments” in September 2007 to “NO” in March 2008 was deemed impossible. Everyone could vote “yes”, “abstain” or “no” on the question whether Germany should vote “YES” or “ABSTAIN” on DIS 29500.
8 votes were in favour of “YES”, 6 were in favour of “ABSTAIN”, some pointing out that they would have preferred to vote an outright “NO”. 4 voted “abstain to the DIN vote”, i.e. on the vote between “YES” and “ABSTAIN” to ISO. 2 of the 4 had initially voted for a German “ABSTAIN”, but under pressure changed within 48 hours their vote from a German “ABSTAIN” to “abstain to the DIN vote”; one of the 4 was compelled by instruction to vote “abstain to the DIN vote”, even though he wanted to vote at least “ABSTAIN”. That means: without very strong pressure from Microsoft Germany would have voted “ABSTAIN”, with 9 to 8.
(Source)
Its more than embarrassing how obviously Microsoft bullies in this whole process in every national standards subsidiary, without being stopped. Do we need more regulation at ISO, like excluding companies from voting which have financial entanglements to the company which places the so-called “standard”?
I think we do. It will be interesting to follow if ISO learns anything from this fiasco (read: disaster) or if we get more rushed-through pseudo standards on the fast lane. On Tuesday Saturday we’ll know – the day when its decided if OOXML gets its ISO approval.