Microsoft Wins A Major Award (careful: It's "fragee-lay")

Microsoft finally gets some recognition:

On September 3rd, ISO announced that the Microsoft proposal had not gathered enough support to be accepted as it is. ISO will now review the comments made on the proposal, and make a final decision in February 2008. FFII president Pieter Hintjens explains, "we could never have done this by ourselves. By pushing so hard to get OOXML endorsed, even to the point of loading the standards boards in Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Portugal, Italy, and beyond, Microsoft showed to the world how poor their format is. Good standards just don't need that kind of pressure. All together, countries made over ten thousands technical comments, a new world record for an ISO vote. Microsoft made a heroic — and costly — effort to discredit their own proposal, and we're sincerely grateful to them."

The FFII Board says the monopolist can collect its prize of 2,500 Euros, minus the cost of registering the noooxml.org domain, 12 euros.

50,000 people from almost a hundred countries have signed the FFII's petition against OOXML to date. Hintjens concludes, "OOXML is not yet dead, even though it's been seriously discredited. Microsoft has one last chance to fix the design flaws and patent problems, and present a clean proposal next February. We think they will make cosmetic fixes and then push all the harder. It's exactly the worst approach and will alienate many governments, possibly spelling the end of their global office monopoly."

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love the Europeans.

edit: Some people have pointed out that I'm misinterpreting this and it's a bad thing. To the contrary. You people lack my superior analytical skills. All publicity is good publicity, and smart-assed little stunts like this only make Microsoft look good. Obviously.