02.22.08
Flurry Of Activity Around Document Formats Before ISO Meeting
Much of the tech world is entranced at the politicking going on as Microsoft seeks to persuade the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to endorse Office Open XML (OOXML, a file format based upon the format used in Microsoft Office 2007) as an international standard. Bloggers ranging from Brian Jones and Doug Mahugh at Microsoft, to IBM’s Bob Sutor and Rob Weir, to renowned standards attorney Andy Updegrove, to independents such as Pamela Jones of Groklaw, myself (Walt Hucks of Opportunity Knocks), Shane Coyle & Roy Schestowitz of Boycott Novell, CyberTech Rambler of CyberTech Rambler, and Orcmid (Dennis E. Hamilton) or Orcmid’s Lair have weighed in with opinions of why the motion should or should not pass.
Regardless of which way the ISO final vote goes, here are some things you should expect to see:
- Microsoft is slowly losing share in the office suite space; losing to FLOSS such as OpenOffice, KOffice, and AbiWord; losing to online office products such as Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, and Ajax13; losing to users of older versions of its software; and especially losing to the move to Web-based everything. If anything, this will only accelerate.
- There is already an international standard for office documents—OpenDocument Format—approved as ISO/IEC 26300:2006. ODF is vendor-neutral, being designed from the beginning to encompass the functionality of multiple vendors’ products. In Europe and other overseas countries, governments, non-profit groups, and educational groups are increasingly standardizing on ODF. Because of immense political pressure, governernmental adoption in the US has lagged, which will cost us in the future when we have to mount a sudden rapid-conversion program.
- Despite new announcements from Redmond about how they are going to make it easier for end-users to use whatever products from whatever vendors and still interchange data files, the simple truth is that their MS Office monopoly is one of only two really successful businesses propping up such flops as the Zune, Origami, and MSN. The American stock market rewards short-sighted and short-term actions, even as those actions combine to have sharply negative longer-term effects on companies. This would seem to indicate that Microsoft (MSFT) will simply try to create new monopolies through takeovers, while desperately fighting to preserve existing monopolies. In short, they cannot afford to make it easy or possible for a competitor to arise that would take away their control of the market.
- The quest for more openness will continue. Organizations such as BytesFree and EFF will continue to push for legal and social recognition of individual data rights. Certain government agencies, along with many large corporations that see dollar signs in data harvesting, will continue to oppose this quest. In other arenas, groups like Creative Commons, the WikiMedia Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation will continue pushing for freedom in software, the arts, and cultural items. In the end, openness is worth the costs, but we have to recognize that it does in fact cost us something and that it is worth that cost in order to have openness and its benefits.
- Users of Linux, FreeBSD, and other alternative operating systems will continue to grow in number. Few, if any, of these users will have access to any OOXML file, while most will continue to have access to ODF and usually the old MSFT binary formats. OOXML is locked into a constantly-shrinking box. A rather large box, to be sure, but still shrinking.
In your home and your business, you should prepare for the coming changes. If you are a Windows-only company, you need to deploy computers powered by Linux or Mac within your business. Chances are, you will find certain closed, proprietary formats and protocols that the newcomers will not translate as well. Those formats and protocols are the ones that give your software vendor an intravenous tap into your wallet. In each case, you should start planning for a move to open standard, vendor-neutral formats and protocols. If you use Microsoft Office, you can start by rolling out Sun’s ODF plugin to all employees and then starting to use OpenDocument Format files as your “official” documents (and the existing binary formats such as .doc and .xls as your “interchange formats” for exchanging documents with those outside your organization during a transition period). During this time, notify your regular clients and suppliers that you are transitioning to ODF formats (make CDs with the plugin and give them out so they too can install it). After a year or so, those clients and suppliers should be ready for your transition.
You should start trying out some of the web-based suites, especially those that support ODF as well as the old MSFT binary formats. I recommend both Google Docs and Zoho. What you do not want to do is let your business get trapped into a single-source solution when that source may be losing share in the market.
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