Microsoft Suffers Latest Blow As NIST Bans Windows Vista - Technology News by Informati... - 0 views
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In a new setback to Microsoft's public sector business, the influential National Institute of Standards and Technology has banned the software maker's Windows Vista operating system from its internal computing networks, according to an agency document obtained by InformationWeek.
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Excuse me! Excuse me! Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing?
NiST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is authorized by the USA Department of Commerce.
Years ago, in conjunction with the Department of Defense (WWI), the Dept of Commerce joined with two manufacturing consortia to form ANSI. Int eh aftemath of WWII and the formation of ISO/IEC, the US Congress, at the behest of the Department of Commerce, authorized the NiST subdiary. NiST then authorized (and continues to oversee) ANSI to take on the USA representation at ISO/IEC.
ANSI in turn authorized INCITS to take on the ISO/IEC document processing specific standardization issues. It is INCiTS that represents the citizens on the ISO/IE SCT 1 workgroups (wk1) responsible for both ISO 26300 (OpenDocument - ODF) and Ecma 376 (MOOX).
Okay, so now we have the technical staffers at NiST refusing to allow purchases of Vista, MSOffice 2007 and IE 7.0. What's going on? And why is this happenign near everywhere at this exact same moment in time?
The answer is that this is clearly plan B.
Plan A was to force Microsoft to enable MSOffice native use of ODF. The reasoning here is that governments could force Microsoft to implement ODF, the monopolist control over desktops would be broken, and the the threat of MS leveraging that monnopoly into servers, devices and Internet systems be averted.
The key to this plan A was to mandate purchase requirements comply with Open Standards. And not just any "Open Standards". Microsoft had previously demonstrated how easy it was to use ECMA as rubber stamp for standards proposals that were anything but open. This is why in August of 2004 the EU asked the OASIS ODF Technical Committee to submit ODF to ISO/IEC. ISO had not yet been corrupted in the same way as the hapless money hungry ECMA.
Plan A was going along