An offer you can’t refuse – Redmond style

This must be the joke of the day. IAMCP (International Association of Microsoft Certified Partners) have decided to sue SIS (Swedish Standards Institute). Oh the irony.

Perhaps you don’t remember this story (or you lived in a cave for the last six months, eating nothing but rocks) so I will retell it. Once upon a time a couple of months ago SIS was preparing to move to vote on the OOXML standard. There had been a work group and they were done. But at the meeting were the vote was to take place there was a sudden influx of new SIS members. Curiously the vast majority of them Microsoft Gold partners. And they voted in favor of standardising OOXML. How strange. SIS has a board though and they looked at the result and the process and decided to throw it out, basically telling IAMCP that the way they had done things (ignoring the process and just turning up at the last minute to change the outcome) wasn’t ok. And now IAMCP is going to sue.

 Scare tactics. Listen IAMCP, you have a lot of members that could take part in the process. They could have done this in a way that fit the way that standardisation is supposed to work. Sit down with other parties and discuss the pros and cons of a format and write comments. Perhaps you learn something you didn’t know. The fact that the Royal Library (that is tasked with ensuring that documents are available for future generations) cast a NO vote tells you something, imagine if you had had the opportunity to actually understand their requirements and what they didn’t like about OOXML.

Let’s face it. You are behaving like assholes. And if it’s one thing that Microsoft really doesn’t need it’s more assholes associated with it.