03.07.08
After The BRM And Into The Future
The ballot resolution meeting for DIS 29500 (Ecma 376/OOXML) has ended. You can search Technorati or IceRocket for the discussion of the event and the edited text that resulted.
Some issues that could not be resolved at the meeting are still threats to your business in the long term. The legal (”IP”) issue, for example, of OOXML is still hazy, pending a thorough review by legal eagles with OASIS, OpenOffice.org, Sun, IBM, KDE/KOffice, and GNOME/AbiWord/Gnumeric. For that reason, it is best to avoid newer versions of Microsoft file types for now.
The stakes are still high. Apparently, Microsoft’s business plan requires ISO approval (why, I do not know, since they never did before) for their file formats, even though the formats were designed to be an exact fit for their product and no one else’s. Exactly what you want in a so-called open format, right? For many of the corrections proposed by Ecma were: make it optional to do things right because MS Office 2007 is shipping with the flawed version already. Sorry, but some of these are deal-breakers. Seriously.
Smaller businesses tend to be more conservative—you don’t hear of them being adventurous in their IT spending—so I expect that many of them are not even considering some of the alternatives instead of buying MS Office 2007. And yet, MSO2K7 faces a rocky road, in part because of issues related to its file formats. In some European countries, for example, all government documents must be in OpenDocument Format (ODF) a competing set of XML-based office document formats. A number of states in the US are similarly considering this choice. If your software cannot work with ODF files, I suggest that you need to start looking around.
Sun has a plugin which can extend MS Office to enable it to work with ODF files, but you still have warning messages every time you save the file. Can you see the consternation when you deploy the plugin to your users’ machines? And yet, if you are using MS Office, that is your best option right now for preparing for the future.
The future. Yes, that’s the issue. Is the future MS-centric and tightly-controlled, or is it a decentralized architecture with a broad mixture of different systems that speak common standardized formats and protocols? I believe the second is the future, and I am working hard to make it happen even faster. As for your business, get ready for the day when your operating system will no longer matter, and neither will what office suite or browser you use.
The future is not OOXML. The future is open and accessible. I encourage you to open your eyes and look around.
