Last week saw some exceptional posting from Andy Updegrove on the "art of the big lie" and messaging battles between vendors supporting the Open Document Format (ODF) standard and Microsoft. Andy does a fine job of calling the question, and brings an analysis to the story as a standards savvy lawyer that few journalists can in the rush to be "newsworthy". David Berlind followed up calling the question on ISO and the value of standards in such a market contest between vendors. Unfortunately, while Berlind's questions are the right ones, he doesn't necessarily have the background in standards to fill in the discussion accurately. Even Gartner's analysts manage to get it wrong, assuming a 70% probability that ISO will refuse Microsoft's Office XML submission. Let's set some ground work for the discussion.
ISO develops standards through its committees and working groups. Member countries form delegations to such groups, through their national standards organizations (BSI, DIN, AFNOR, ANSI, etc.). Each national group forms opinions and delegations through the participation of "experts" within the country. A lot of these experts work for the vendors. So you'll see coverage by large corporations like IBM and Sun by design. (OASIS and ECMA membership to create the specification, and then through various different national bodies to help encourage ISO adoption.)
It's a game of technology diplomacy, and in the end, after the dinners and meetings are over, the job is to expand one's area of economic influence and defend sovereign territory. Microsoft tends to play the game poorly in so far as they don't necessarily invest to the depth that an IBM does in covering the board, nor do they appreciate that a diplomat is ultimately supposed to be invisible. Fortunately (for the rest of us) they treat it too much like a direct market competition so their actions tend to be highly visible. Their current standards strategy would tend to be patent focused since they appear to be rather (patent) lawyer heavy in the standards strategy team that is part of Legal and Corporate Affaires. Again, they don't understand the economic dynamic.
The potential patent problems with Microsoft's proposed standard can't be fought at ISO or ECMA or any other standards development organization for that matter. Standards and patents are orthogonal.
Standards exist in an economic system to encourage multiple implementations. Patents exist in the economic system to protect a single implementation. By definition these tools are focused on different economically conflicting jobs. This is why every standards development organization needs rules about how to deal with patents. It's not that they are encouraging the licensing of inbound property, but rather they need a way to handle the discussion of such intellectual property when they discover it in their midst, or to at least best prevent it from causing them grief from their own members by having the discussion up front. (OASIS does actually have a great IPR policy at this point, because of how it forces the conversation.) There is no economically feasible way to prevent an outside party with a patent from gumming up the works.
Microsoft will hammer away at their covenant not to sue with respect to patents and their Office XML formats, and ambiguity
around which patents are covered under what circumstances. So they
likely can demonstrate to ISO that with their covenant they are well within ISO's IP policy and that this need not be a concern. (Even the
confusion they continue to engender around C#/CLI, patents, and the
ECMA specs turned ISO standards, won't be a valuable example because no
one could demonstrate that anyone is being hurt or that the confusion
is a deliberate strategy.)
Then there's the issue with respect to competing standards. This too is a red herring.
While ISO certainly doesn't like to encourage competing or overlapping standards, they will not necessarily prevent them. They are a standards development organization in place to ensure that the rules of development are transparent and followed. It is not their role (nor do you ever want it to be) to manage the marketplace through determining the economic viability of a standard.
They would be hard pressed to refuse to accept the fast track for the specification Microsoft drives through ECMA based on a scope that says "just like our yet to be delivered product". That's not to say Sun and IBM participation won't seek to slow it down, and that would be a fine thing, but don't count on blocking the entrance of the standard.
A better way to tackle the problem may be to encourage procurement organizations to consider why they procure to standards. Such organizations want the competition encouraged by multiple implementations, and the value in the innovation beyond the standard those implementations embody. This is consistent with the rhetorical line Microsoft started with those same organizations when first realizing open source might threaten their control. They helped establish the discussion that customers really want to procure against standards.
But it first requires multiple implementations.
It is a very small step to encourage those agencies in their procurements to consider the measure of a standard's success to be the number of implementations of a standard against which they're procuring that presently exist versus promises from vendors of possible future implementations. It opens the door for lots of demonstrations of interoperability between products, allowing the customer to make the decision based on other real world factors.
It forces Microsoft to invest heavily in their relationships with the likes of Corel and Apple to try to cajole and arm twist other implementations of the Microsoft XML formats (which they won't be able to settle until they're ready to ship Office 12) or be caught being the only implementation of their own standard.
A standard with only one implementation, regardless of the imprimatur of multiple standards organizations, is still a failure.
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