[LINK] Standards Australia on ooxml

[Glen Turner]

The proposal is that ODF and OOXML be standards for the same thing --
office documents.

Standards Australia have been here before and stuffed it up totally.

I'm talking about trailer connectors. The three vendors submitted
differing standards. These, remarkably, matched their shipping
products.  Rather than take the best of each, or pick a winner,
Standards Australia made all three standard connectors.

So when you hire a trailer and the connector doesn't fit, you
know who to blame.  This is the way Standards Australia wanted
it.

Worse still, all three proposals were technically defective.
The return ('ground') pin was the same size as the other pins,
despite it carrying up to three times the current.  So burnt
out earth pins were a major cause of failed lights on the
large trailers behind prime movers and a distinct threat for
petrol tankers.

That's why there's been such a sudden shift to LCD lights
on large trailers. These draw less current and keep the
current on the earth pin within tolerance.

Anyway, the parallel to the ODF/OOXML situation is clear
enough. Microsoft have OOXML and won't add decent ODF
support, everyone else uses ODF (and most of these have
moved to using ODF as their native file format).

-- 
 Glen Turner