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Story: ISO calls for end to OOXML 'personal attacks'

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Apple and Google are "tech darlings" for a reason... Their stuff rocks.

Microsoft, the company behind this "product", is definitely part the problem. But, I'm sure if OOXML was submitted anonymously, it would have been dumped, dumped, dumped.

Branding it with the Microsoft logo just makes it worse because there is a clear distinction between Microsoft and darling Apple and Google, and it is not that they are the flavor of the day. Apple and Google represent good design, and good thinking, Microsoft represents profit and devastation.

The reason so many people so deep in technology hate Microsoft is because Microsoft has ruined the potential of what computation could have been over the last 20 years. We are witnessing the uprising frustration of a generation of software developers who have witnessed slaughter and felt helpless to do anything about it.

To continue the comparison, Microsoft was built by a man and now a culture whose only focus was to beat the competition to death and take over market for the sake of profit, Google and Apple have, by actions and by words, served the public, created high quality products, and pro-actively adopted global standards and open source (Apple: Firewire, USB, IDE, Unix, Samba, MPEG, PHP, Apache, etc, and Google: SOAP, REST, etc).

What can be said said about Microsoft except that they do good business? They know how to create markets, they know how to make products that birth an entire new industry and workforce to deal with the bad design foisted upon unsuspecting CEOs and users (massive IT departments and MSCE garbage), they know how to put stuff in a box and sell it.

As a computer advocate, user, developer since I first time I heard buzzing and beeping coming from a cassette tape representing the amazing universe of software that would come, I am saying that there is a real difference between Microsoft and the quality of companies like Google and Apple. Microsoft took opportunity and bludgeoned their way into the void over the last decades. That doesn't mean they deserve to stay and be given "international welfare" and a position in history (as the company that wasted another 20 years of our computational and social evolution). Not this time!

I have suffered for too long with Microsoft products and I will not anymore stand idly by when future generations and our entire world depend on computers. Clarity and generosity is what is needed, not business and strategy. We're shooting for the moon, not trying to steal it.

Let's not pretend that Microsoft is anything other than the sum of their actions, and their actions suck to this very minute. OOXML shall not ever truly become a "standard" since that's an oxymoron as others have pointed out: Slippery, vague, unresolved, specs. That sounds like Vista, XBox Live, Zune, and lots of lawsuits to me...

We can all individually be hornswaggled into using Microsoft products and pay the consequences for our choices (and all the reboots required. I can't wait till people have to start rebooting their Lincoln Navigators with "SYNC" installed), but we must not allow that dilemma and the weight of bad design take our focus off demanding strong, robust, and truly universal standards.

On a side note, I feel somewhat sorry for some of the software developers who get their paycheck from Microsoft. I wish them the best. I sort-of see them as the victims of a mass delusion crafted by management, that they're building something great. All that talent, stuck in the mire that is disgusting code, and harsh business practices over doing what's right for the world of computing.

Microsoft will die, but it will be a horribly slow thrashing death. Preventing the foolhardy adoption of OOXML and all 6000 pages of its shifty spec as a standard will ease the world's pain and help the us get past this era when selfish businesses attempted to take control of something that needs to be in the public domain.

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