The Definition of Insanity

Jeremy Allison, on the suspicous voting patterns in the ISO standardization process for Microsoft’s OOXML document formats:

So we saw over the past few weeks some strange and rather irregular national positions coming to light. My own favorites were Cuba voting “yes” to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan’s “yes” vote, even though OOXML as defined isn’t able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.

(Via Simon Willison.)

★ Sunday, 16 September 2007