Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Earlier this week I spent almost seven hours stranded in Baltimore Airport waiting for a connecting flight, this gave me plenty of time to catch up on reading some of the blogs that I have lost track of during the last few weeks.

One of the posts that caught my eye was an opinion piece on Bob Sutor’s blog, the second in a series he has been writing up on the Open XML ballot resolution process.

Bob is a smart guy and has a lot of good things to say about standards in general, certainly about the way that they relate to the industry today.

In this particular case though he has gone a little beyond the usual stylish and subtle way that he seems to put across IBM’s PR messaging on Open XML. As usual he puts his opinion forward as fact, but in many parts of the post it seems that he may be misunderstanding the well established ISO processes.

Jason Matusow has taken some of the questions raised by Bob and responded accordingly, both posts make for interesting reading.

As is always the case with these types of conversations there seem to be multiple views put forward for the benefit of different audiences. I find that the obvious authority on these types of debate are the national standards organizations who always have a very clear and level headed view of issues that are subject to broad debate on the blogosphere.

When it comes down to it the regulations that govern and direct the actions of JTC1 are generally pretty clear, and I would always suggest reading them for yourself, along with anything you can find posted by anybody involved directly with any standards process, then forming your own view on what needs to be done.

So, if you find yourself stranded in an airport somewhere with free wireless and nothing better to do then I’d suggest having a read of Bob’s views on the BRM process, Jason’s response and finally the BRM FAQ that was put out by JTC1 earlier this month.