Microsoft East Africa has dismissed allegations that it threatened to withdraw funding to Kenya if the government did not vote "yes" on OOXML.

Yesterday we wrote about ugly denials by Microsoft and even ISO — denials that shortly afterwards turned out to be bald-faced lies. It new reports are correct, this appears to have also been the case elsewhere, further away from the sight of the western world.

This new report is rather disgusting yet by no means surprising. You really have to follow the names and attributions carefully here in order to know if it’s a Novell employee or a Microsoft employee being quoted.

At this stage, ISO seems to have a rough idea of what’s to come. OOXML could still be binned, as it always should have right from the very start had it not been for corruption.

The SFLC has already informed us all that OOXML is clearly incompatible with the GNU GPL. But Microsoft seems to have just picked itself another smaller target (it’s a pattern that we last mentioned days ago). It insulted the intelligence of the Groklaw crowd with some rude remarks on this issue.

One of the arguments adduced in favour of making OOXML an ISO standard was that it would place control of the former in the hands of an independent ISO group, which was a much better situation than the present one. Anyone who believes this has clearly learned nothing from Microsoft's history of unremitting subversion of practically every independent standard it has been involved with.

Tim Bray was clearly dissatisfied the last time his words were carefully selected and then used to describe the terrible state of the OOXML BRM in Geneva [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. To be more specific, it was the “cherry-picking” as he later called it that had him disappointed by articles quoting him.

The nominal approval of OOXML last month unleashed an unprecedented outpouring of anger, with much of that ire directed at the ISO for failing to uphold basic standards during the process. This has prompted it to respond with a rather interesting FAQ in which it desperately tries to defend itself.