Krishwords

Electronic Frontier Finland has released a report that points to an interesting piece of data. The countries where corruption is high has voted in favor of Microsoft. Add to this the news reports about Microsoft employee who was caught offering compensation for partners who are willing to say “Yes” to OOXML. Sounds fishy to me.

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) rejected the fast-track approval of the controversial Microsoft-supported OOXML document format as an ISO standard in a vote on 2 September 2007. During the voting process the reputation of ISO as a dependable technical standardization organization was questioned. For example, in Sweden a Microsoft representative was caught offering to recompense partners for voting yes to OOXML. Also a sudden interest from countries like Ivory Coast to the OOXML issue has been found suspicious. We studied the relation between the corruption level and voting behaviours of the countries. We found that more corrupted the country is, the more likely it was to vote for the unreserved acceptance of the OOXML standard proposal.

Image Credit: effi.org