24 April 2007

Ars Nova: The Art of Misrepresentation

A nice summary by Rob Weir of Microsoft's increasingly desperate campaign to undermine ODF in every way possible through artful and persistent misrepresentation of the facts. It begins with a real killer opening par:

Tim Anderson has an interesting article up on his ITWriting blog, "Microsoft’s Jean Paoli on the XML document debate". Of course, I treat anything Jean Paoli says on XML with such attention as I usually reserve for listening to the isorhythmic motets of Philippe de Vitry. Like de Vitry, Paoli can be understood on several different levels: What is he saying? And what is he really saying.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Too bad he claims no one from the British Library endorses OpenXML.

http://www.bl.uk/about/annual/2005to2006/connectingdigital.html

Glyn Moody said...

Good point: like Tony Blair, the British Museum seems to have lost its head over Sir Bill, to the point of irrationality. Thanks for the link.

But I don't think it invalidates the overall argument (not least because I've made it myself at various times....)

Anonymous said...

Go back and read how Rob responded to that outdated quote since these comments were posted.

What's stunning is the shear amount of politiking by Microsoft. MS-OOXML is not strong enough to stand on its own merits, so it has to buy its certifications through hush and bribe money.

No matter, the steady encroachment of open source will only extend Microsoft’s frustration.

Glyn Moody said...

Thanks for the pointer to the update. But I'm still worried about the BL....

Anonymous said...

It's sure not clear who's the most frustrated or desperate here. Anybody remember Sutor's link to a linked copy of the Australian comments back in February? (The post he quickly deleted when people started pointing out that's against the ISO rules.)

And what about this comment:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/04/20/a-few-updates-on-the-openxml-formats.aspx#2266485

That metadata makes Weir's raving about the Malaysian and Kenyan objections pretty funny.

Glyn Moody said...

I'm sure there are all kinds of things going on in the background, but as I said above, I don't think it undermines the main points of Rob Weir. I don't claim to know things down to the level of metadata, but the top-level stuff seems fairly clear.