The title of this piece is an old French saying. You will soon understand what it means. Forget a moment about the Microsoft-Yahoo stories. They’re important, although even the best take on them, in my opinion, still largely misses one important element of the proposed deal: Namely, that such an acquisition of Yahoo! by Microsoft would not take those two very far. However, Microsoft could use the only outstanding asset of the deal to disseminate its own proprietary technologies such as Silverlight, CLR, WP/F and everything .NET . Enough said for the moment.

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And I’m not afraid to write it again: What are you guys think you’re doing? Level up the fight, I’m yawning!

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The title really says it all: The Ecma applies for a fast-track procedure at the beginning of 2007; despite objections, it’s going through the process with a razor-thin margin. Remember the fast-track proceedings are about checking major flaws in the specification beforehand. Nothing comes out of it, but when it goes through examination by the countries, thousands of comments, most of them pointing out to alleged issues, hundreds of them actually highlighting major flaws in OOXML, are being produced and published. 

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This is winter, the winter that most of my french audience has come to dislike: In Paris, snow is rare, because of pollution and a specific geographical situation. In a way, it’s a bit like Portland, OR. where the climate is oceanic enough to block snowing. Add to this the fact that Paris is geographically a large meadow surrounded by plateaus and high hills, and you will get a “dirty winter”.

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