Over a year ago, I indulged in some idle speculation about how Microsoft would respond to the remarkable groundswell in favour of the OpenDocument Format (ODF) – a revolutionary new standard for how office documents should be stored. Quote:

2. Fall-back position: get Microsoft’s Open XML ’standard’ approved by as many standards bodies as Microsoft can buy persuade (that’s probably all of them)

I should now replace the buy with buy. As reported in Computerworld:

Microsoft Corp. admitted Wednesday that an employee at its Swedish subsidiary offered monetary compensation to partners for voting in favor of the Office Open XML document format’s approval as an ISO standard.

My colleague Leif in neighbouring Denmark expresses his disgust in his blog. I’m just amazed that the attempt to rig the ballot was carried out in such a clumsy fashion. For a company with Microsoft’s wealth and influence, this was a pretty poor attempt.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 30th, 2007 at 10:49 pm and is filed under OpenDocument. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.