That’s the definition of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Is ISO as an organisation imperfect sometimes (as in the docs case) sure?, it’s composed of humans who are generally flawed creatures, is it generally a good solution despite that?, also sure.

They’ve published tens of thousands off standards over 70 plus years that are deeply important to multiple industries so disregarding them because Microsoft co-opted them once 20 odd years ago seems unreasonable to me.

What .docx fiasco?

That can depend on how the spec gets made into an ISO standard. There is a process called "harvesting" that can allow the original author to continue to distribute an existing specification independently of ISO.

> Says that, but I don't agree with that

I guess you just never had to fill in a grant application where you have to justify that you are using official standards so that you can get money

languages are more fluid than processor architectures. I don't think they can be compared.

I wouldn't say it never had a problem, but the profiles are definitely a reasonable solution.

However even with profiles there are optional extensions and a lot of undefined behaviour (sometimes deliberately, sometimes because the spec is just not especially well written).

Governments seem to care about "self-sufficiency" a lot more these days, especially after what's happening in both China and the US right now.

If the choice is between an architecture owned, patented and managed by a single company domiciled in a foreign country, versus one which is an international standard and has multiple competing vendors, the latter suddenly seems a lot more attractive.

Price and performance don't matter that much. Governments are a lot less price-sensitive than consumers (and even businesses), they're willing to spend money to achieve their goals.

This is exactly what makes this such an interesting development. Standardization is part of the process of the CPU industry becoming a mature industry not dependent on the whims of individual companies. Boring, yes, but also stable.

Yes, and they're both massively debated and criticised, to the point that the industry developed Risk-V in the firstplace. Not to mention the rugpull licensing ARM pulled a few years back.

Yes, but if 30 years ago ARM had an ISO standard they could point to, that would have probably helped with government adoption?

(It's still a trade-off, because standards also cost community time and effort.)

they are de-facto…