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Story: Microsoft admits to standards ignorance pre-OOXML

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Reporting what was said.

Thanks for your comment.

This is a News article - that means I report on what is said in an un-bias way. That means reporting what the Microsoft representative had to say when questioned about why so many people believed the voting process around OOXML was flawed.

If you read the article, you can see that Microsoft made the comments about their standards ignorance, in response to a question – a question which I asked them (not that is important). The fact that there were other people with questions to ask unfortunately meant that I was unable to push them on their answer which I would have liked to have done.

I do accept however that I should have taken some time to contact Microsoft – and try and get further comment on this story, as it did seem odd that they would admit to not having any standards expertise. However, the rule of thumb when reporting is that if a company spokesperson says something in an open meeting then he is seen as speaking for the company.

The article does not say categorically that Microsoft does not have any standards expertise – what is says is, a Microsoft employee claimed that his company does not have any standards expertise. That is a big difference.

While other employees at Microsoft may have an alternative view of the company's experience and expertise around standards – I believe it was fair to apply the comments that McKee made as being representative of the whole company. Let's not forget that McKee was speaking at an open source conference – not exactly home-turf – so one would expect him to be very careful with his language.

Microsoft's Jason Matusow, whose blog says he works on interoperability and standards for the company, appeared to be confused by McKee's comments and claimed that the company does actually have something akin to a standards department which pre-dates all the activity around OOXML (and that is the important bit right – no one would be surprised to know that Microsoft has tuned into standards now)

"More than eight years ago, a corporate standards organization was formed in the company to help product teams be better participants in standards orgs, to make more strategic decisions about what and where to contribute specifications, and how to deal with the legal issues surrounding standards bodies (there is an entire specialization in the legal field for this kind of work believe it or not).

"Currently, the standards organization at Microsoft has more than 25 full-time employees in it and is focused not only on standards, but how the company thinks about interoperability and standards as a whole. What's more, because we are active in more than 150 standards orgs at any one time, and more than 400 overall - we have more than 600 product team and field employees who have been internally certified for standards work (and most of them are active in some committee or other"

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