There is something I call the “Chernobyl Design Pattern”, where you take your worst bug, the ugliest part of your code, the part that is so bad, so radioactive that no one can touch it without getting killed, and you make it private and inaccessible, and put a new interface around it, essentially entomb it in concrete so that no one can get close to it. In other words, if you can't fix it, at least contain the damage.

Of course, those quite old among us recognize the allusion to the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Let the programmer beware.

UPDATE: I have misread the original blog. Actually the author said that Microsoft was actually doing worse than settling for the "Chernobyl Design Pattern" by making its mistake propagate all the way to the Office Open XML specification and into all software that will implement the specification should it become a ratified ISO standard. This is just one of the many objections in the software community to the ISO adopting Office Open XML. (ISO has already ratified the OpenDocument Format as ISO 26300, by the way.)