Ignoring the “malicious and bad” jokes that I’ve being read about ISO (yep, now ISO is subject of jokes) as “The mess on ISO is so great that they even get their ISO 9000 certificate” “or” You know the meaning of ISO: I Sold Out “, I think that the ending question of this all is: They really won?

My simple answer to that is that everyone has lost.

I personally lost my privacy, I lost my “financial security”, I lost my patience (ok, it wasn’t that big) and lost what remained of respect by certain company on the market (not counting holidays, Christmas, New Year, Carnival and all the weekends it could go surfing and enjoy life with my family I have just leaving aside to be at home studying the now “International Joke … ops, sorry … International Standard.”).

My personal opinion is that (no names, ok?) some countries simply lost its “technological sovereignty”, some has lost their “international respect” and other simply “lost time”, after all spend months and months analyzing something seriously to ends on a “stuff like that” in the final outcome is really disappointing.

Since I like jokes, this one now will only be understood by my family but, see mom, when I was a child didn’t I say to you that I’ll be a Clown ? No Engineering degree or post graduation and specialization or nights at my room studying prevented that !!! Better than that, they even managed a way to makes me an International Clown (hey mom, better that you imagined, isn’t it … international star …).

I think that this history reminds me a little different one: Not lied, not stolen, did anything wrong and lost … I can only be one thing: BRAZILIAN!

And it is this observation that now makes me change my answer: We really won !

We, Brazilians, we won because he have entered into this battle and exited on top (without finger in the eye and no low punch). We played according to the rules of the game, even if some parties had tried to give “his version” of the rules during all the time.

We’ve won yet because we strengthened. We never were so respected in the international IT market and never a discussion of open standards made part of the agenda of many important people in the world and therefore we could never speak with such property to a very select audience. We’ve won to have united Greeks and Trojans in this discussion and for having discovered that rival companies in the market can sit down, discuss and build together. This is for me a new paradigm, which will soon bring results to all involved.

We’ve won also for showing to the whole world that problems are problems and that the “real technical decisions” are really simple ones, almost Boolean (or right or wrong … the more or less is marketing …no need to vote… yes or no, as I’ve commented here).

If the decision taken is that problems are “small things”, it wasn’t a technical decision and therefore we all gain a great example of where the things can go when you put the “good technique” away (or someone there can, without consuming hallucinogenic substances, believed that having FIVE OFFICIALLY RECOMMENDED WAYS TO WRITE A SINGLE DATE is something logical and natural ??? And also that this will improve interoperability ?). To be honest, I’m a great a fan of Rock’n Roll and I really saw a good “revival” of the 70’s lysergy on it all (because only with too much LSD in my head I could perhaps explain and defend publicly the thesis that a single international standard is actually five who actually haves two compliance clauses, which makes it ten at the same time being a single one… I’m dizzy just thinking about it… and I’m clean, ok ?).

We’ve won again when we see that our ODF, ISO-26300 was so dangerous that made a company sponsor a true world war only to have the right to speak “at least our spec has the same status as their spec”. It is a shame that they have followed the strategy of Machiavelli but now they will pass the next five or ten years explaining publicly the “means justified by the ends” (I can’t avoid another philosophical stuff, but what happens if the end is really “the end” ? Can you justify any means for that ? Again, only with LSD !!!).

We are also in the profit zone to see that the decisions taken by ISO are really moved by business and commercial interests and that therefore, the story of “if ISO said, it is said” is really a fairytale (and here among us, to me ISO 9000 has always been a “bad joke”, but forget it) …

To summarize the “real winning side”, I think we won because we all lost the innocence and discovered that even the things we considered more serious and solid in the world can really be corrupted or at least severely distorted (and here it is a huge homework to us all, to identify and break the mechanisms of corruption/distortion used by now).

As always said and I repeat (and perhaps this is why I’m called “a polemic person”), I use and advocate the use ODF by a “simple matter of hygiene.”

At the end, I would like to thank Microsoft for having made us lose at least a year of our lives to learn lessons as important and really wish them luck in the future. They will need, because with a reputation as theirs today and the “historic victory” of a standard that asks us all to “pretend that existed on February 29, 1900″, now I really understand why we have so many Service Packs.

Moreover, three simple questions to Microsoft about the OpenXML:

1 – When Microsoft Office will support IS 29500 (it supports now the ECMA-376, a different specification) ? And which of it will be supported (IS 29500-1, IS 29500-2, IS 29500-3, IS 29500-4, IS 29500-5) with which conformance class (see how will be very easy to buy a simple Office Suite that supports OpenXML…) ?

2 - When will be released the next Service Pack of OpenXML?

3 - You already prepared a mechanism for Auto-Update at ISO? It will be via “plug-in” or using the some “backdoor” stuff?

Cheers from Brazil,

Jomar

PS.: For everything that I saw on this process, the results was published by ISO on the best possible day: 1st of April…