04.07.07
California’s Future At Stake With AB-1668
California and AB-1668: Why Do We Need It?
I have discussed the general politics of why California needs quick passage of AB-1668. It simply makes good social, political, and economic policy.
I want to speak to the impact on smaller businesses, and why I believe that small businesses in California stand to gain in the long run if AB-1668 is passed quickly, in its current form.
Follow The Money Trail
One thing that is always necessary when someone comes squawking for political action is to find out who benefits from it. A few years ago, there was a bill to mandate employer-paid health insurance in California. Suddenly, we saw commercials featuring tearful small business owners (such as restauranteurs) asking why they were being forced out of business. The problem was, those commercials were also helpful to certain large, wealthy, out-of-state companies. Which group do you think (small businesses or large ones) had the resources to fund a statewide political campaign? Why do you think they did it?
If you said they wanted to keep all the money for themselves, you get an “A” for the day.
Now when you hear someone asking for “choice” in file formats instead of open standards that can be used by anyone in the industry, (that is, someone who opposes bills like AB-1668), whose financial interests are at stake? Do their interests and the interests of the state and its citizens agree on it? Probably not, since they would not need to mount this opposition campaign if their own interests were not opposed to the interests of the general public.
Mandatory Shift Coming
Microsoft, rather than open up the specification for their legacy binary formats (e.g., .doc, .xls. .ppt), chose to move to a completely different set of formats for Office 2007 and beyond. It gave them the opportunity to clean out a bunch of cruft that had built up over the years. But they did not choose to do so. Instead, they brought all of that foulness into their file formats for the foreseeable future.
We already know that the current binary file formats that are commonly used in business are being killed off. There are two primary choices as to where your business may go in the future. The first, OASIS OpenDocument Format (ISO/IEC 26300:2006), is open–controlled by a standards organization which makes updates to it from time to time and is not beholden to a particular vendor–and has been selected by regional and national governments and their agencies all around the world. It is used by multiple vendors of office application suites, content management systems, and format transformation tools. It is used by online office sites like Google Docs and Zoho Office. It is an official international standard, approved by the ISO.
The other choice is Microsoft-Ecma Office Open XML, known as ECMA 376 or ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The DIS part indicates that it is being discussed for possible acceptance as a standard. There is only one product that supports it, Microsoft Office 2007. When Ecma International received their charter to standardize the format, they were given a predesigned format and told to rubber-stamp it. In the current ISO discussion, 19 nations lodged objections to the format or the fast-track process being used to push it through the standards group.
… to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications within the Ecma International standards process which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats….
How Does This Affect You?
But let us discuss why this is important to your business. You have older documents from 1994, don’t you? Good. See if you can open it today. There is a good chance that you can not. Why? Well, you saved them on 5 1/4 inch floppy disks, and now you do not have any equipment that can read them. Or maybe you were dilligent about moving your data to newer storage. But you were probably using WordPerfect 5.1 on MS-DOS back then. Today’s Word may not be capable of reading that format. Or maybe your data was saved in the then-current version of Word. That does not necessarily mean that you can read it with your current version.
Maybe that file includes your rich uncle’s will, you know, the one where he left everything to you? If you can not find a way to open that file, everything goes to your cousin Fred. So you hire the neighborhood teen whiz kid, but he has recently been visited by the copyright enforcers. He refuses to get your data into a format you can use today unless you get a signed letter from the CEO of the company that made the software that you used to create that file. (Blasted DMCA! You stand to lose millions and you can not even break into your own files to get your own data!)
This will be repeated with today’s data unless you select a format that is open, and which has explicit permission for anyone to use it for any application for any reason at any time.
I am not a legal beagle, but those who are have not been convinced that MS-OOXML is a safe bet for implementers.
You already know what happens when one of your suppliers gets a monopoly share in the market. After a while, prices rise and quality falls. The supplier stops improving the product and it becomes a “cash cow” for them. Perhaps they use the cash for executive bonuses. Maybe they use it to subsidize money-losing ventures that would otherwise close.
This has already happened with office application suite software, but we now have a chance to reverse it. Our monopoly supplier is making major, incompatible changes in their office software, including new file formats. Regardless of what else you do, you will pay big bucks. So now, you can move all at once to a new format that is not controlled by any single vendor. Suddenly, anyone’s products can read and write your documents in an accurate way. You no longer need one particular vendor’s products–if they refuse to give you the pricing and features that you want, you can find someone else who can–because the applications’ native file format becomes irrelevant to the decision.
But there is more reason for you to make your stand for ODF. One of the richest companies in the world has your state and your company in its grasp. The vendor has every reason to fight a proposal that would reduce your costs and the costs to taxpayers. On the other hand, you business and your state have every reason to support this proposal. Why? Because an industry-wide standard means that you can use almost any vendor’s product and still get the same result. It puts control in your hands instead of the vendor’s hands.
Certainly, you could choose to sit idly on the sidelines while others decide your future. However, our audience, or at least our target audience, has a high percentage of both business owners and technical people who are able to recognize the potential benefit to us all and who recognize that Microsoft is threatened by this because it would reduce the profitability of one of their cash cows.
Smaller businesses benefit from open standards.
In the course of everyday business, users of open standards have the ability to mix and match products from different vendors to achieve their desired result. This means that your business does not become dependent upon any particular vendor’s products, but instead maintains the ability to swap a product with other vendors’s products at any time.
This is the reason why the World Wide Web works so well. You used to have to use special AOL software for their network, special Compuserve software for their network, special MSN software for their network, and special Prodigy software for their network. If you were an active member of all of them, you had to have several different programs installed in order to do the same things. When commercial use of the Web exploded ten or twelve years ago, suddenly, these “walled gardens” could not keep up and began to lose their allure. The freedom to use any network with the any set of software made it very attractive to build Web sites versus Compuserve-only sites. To be sure, many sites had both a Web component and a part that was only inside of one of those walled garden networks. But the freedom in the Internet enabled all sorts of things (both good and bad) that had never been considered before.
Your business, by selecting an open, XML-based file format (and I do not mean Microsoft’s not-so-open-xml format), makes it possible to create all sorts of unexpected uses for the data that had previously been locked up in your documents.
