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Posted at 1:18pm on 21 Apr 2008
Hooray for Bureaucracy
Just over a year ago we wrote about Microsoft's OOXML format, a dreadful specification that they were trying to get ratified as an ISO standard.
Anyone who has been following this sorry and sordid story will know that after initially rejecting the spec on technical grounds, almost every party eventually gave in and voted yes to the standard, despite the fact that none of their concerns had been addressed.
Now at least part of the mystery of how this happened has been revealed. It turns out that (in Norway at least) an 80% majority of experts is overruled by one bureaucrat.
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