My favorite quote of the day so far comes from a comment that was filed on Bob Sutor's post about how the International Organization of Standardization is risking irrelevancy based on the way it ignored objections to the rushing of the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification through the ISO's ratification process. OOXML is primarily a Microsoft-authored competitor to the already ISO-ratified OpenDocument Format (ODF). Bob Sutor is the grand pooh-bah of open standards at IBM (a major proponent of ODF).In his post, Sutor thoroughly lashed the ISO:

But the gem of a quote came in one of the comments:

My post here isn't to say which ISO standard better or worse: OOXML or ODF. But, with the ISO's approval of OOXML as a standard for the same thing that the ISO-ratified ODF does, the ISO is now getting outted for the way its practices could plunge it into irrelevancy. ArsTechnica recently published a post under the headline ISO: procedural shortcuts OK, OpenXML appeal denied. Pamela Jones over at Groklaw asks why certain provisos in the ISO's own directives document are somehow getting overlooked. And there are tons of other posts about the issue amounting to a collective "What the ?" from the Internet community.

On one hand, I'm glad to see that the ISO is finally getting the criticism it so badly deserves. Ecma, the organization responsible for putting OOXML on the ISO's "fast track" deserves it, too. It should have been dismantled for the sham that it is years ago. Its process comes up way short in the integrity department: a state of affairs that was only confirmed (in my mind) by the way Ecma presided over the recent ECMAScript (JavaScript) deliberations. It's a long story with the appearance of a happy ending called ECMAScript Harmony. But my sense is that the ending wasn't quite so harmonious for everyone. The guy who runs Ecma (or ran it at the time OOXML was fast tracked) -- Jan van den Beld -- basically admitted it was a bit of sham when, in my interview of him, he said the following:

On the other hand, all this discussion of the ISO suddenly becoming irrelevant should come as news to no one. Almost two years ago, based on what I knew of the process then, I wrote:

Again, I want to make sure that my opinion here isn't stretched into being an opinion of the technologies discussed. Imagine, for example, if the W3C came up with two standards for the Web? It doesn't mattter which two it picked. What matters is the lack of interoperability that follows. It's the process that stinks and that will ultimately take down an organization that the world badly needs during this time of globalization.