07.23.07
Posted in Political, Small Business at 8:46 by lnxwalt
In CSUSB Needs To Lead Us, I proposed a regional economic development effort.
Ever since the late 1980s and early 1990s, there have been mild efforts to bring a genuine branch campus of California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) to the area. While we continue to discuss this, the Coachella Valley has not only proposed such a thing, but has gotten together and paid for it, and as a result of strong local interest, succeeded in reaching its goal: The former Coachella Valley Center of CSUSB is now officially the Palm Desert Campus of CSUSB. Meanwhile, residents of the Victor Valley and Barstow areas continue to drive thirty miles or more to get to the nearest state university campus.
I propose that the Town of Apple Valley make available some land in the vicinity of the Apple Valley Airport, preferably along Dale Evans Parkway, for such a campus. Closer to the I-15 freeway is better in this case, and the location is fairly central once the Barstow area enters consideration. Since this will definitely increase traffic, DEPkwy should be widened to a four-lane road (two in each direction), with turning lanes added for sites such as the Wal-Mart distribution center where a relatively large number of commuters need to turn. In fact, a traffic light may even be justified at the High Desert Campus.
The CSUSB College of Business and Public Administration is accredited by the NASPAA. Public administration is not unlike administration of non-profits, so how about a practicum, a hands-on component in which students help manage and raise funding for non-profits that are assisting in the effort to build up the community the university’s High Desert Campus?
One major add-on. In keeping with the grand vision in the earlier article, I propose that the State of California admits that the present petroleum-based economy cannot continue indefinitely and therefore slap a twenty percent tax on the retail price of petroleum products to be spent designing, developing, constructing, and operating alternative energy generation facilities and high-speed rail lines between residential areas and employment, commerce, and entertainment centers. On top of that, add another 5% tax for CSU and community college research, education, and training programs related to this development.
These taxes will hurt–a lot–but continued inaction will bring even more intense pain in the near future. If we act now, our pain will be diminishing when other areas first start to recognize that a forced change is at hand.
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07.21.07
Posted in Local News, Political, Small Business at 16:48 by lnxwalt
I am a proud graduate of our nearby campus of the California State University. I took Business Administration at CSU San Bernardino (CSUSB). I was there when the University’s College of Business and Public Administration received AACSB acreditation. It was a good school then, and it is a good school now.
CSUSB has its main campus at the foot of the San Bernardino mountains, near the intersection of the I-15 and I-215 freeways (the I-210/CA-30 is also nearby). It also has a branch campus in Palm Desert, funded through a unique partnership between local Coachella Valley businesses and governments with the state of California.
In the Victor Valley and Barstow areas, there are large numbers of people coming into the area, but relatively few employment opportunities for those residents. As a consequence, motivated residents tend to take a lot of classes at our local community colleges (Victor Valley Community College and Barstow Community College). Those who can afford the commute then wind up driving up and down the Cajon Pass to complete their Bachelor Degrees at the CSUSB main campus.
I propose that local government, local businesses, and the two community colleges sit down with the administration of CSUSB and work out a solution. Here are my ideas:
- Create the High Desert Campus (or campuses) on land near Southern California Logistics Airport (SCLA), Apple Valley Airport, or Barstow-Daggett Airport. This campus should include branch campuses of the two community colleges as well. Another interesting option is to get other state-owned universities (University of California-Riverside [UCR] and California State Polytechnic University-Pomona [CSPUP] come to mind) to also join in the effort.
- Research–the community needs research into alternative energy, conservation, recycling, mass transit, information technology & robotics, and low environmental-impact production processes. Let that be a focus of this campus, combining technology, business, and the sciences into a blended program that is both theoretical and practical. For example, developing residential (home/apartment-based) power generation systems that can then be installed throughout the area would both advance our understanding of the challenges of such systems and have practical effects of lowering the utility costs of local residents. Research into mass transportation systems to connect areas like ours to regional employment and recreation centers is another area of need. Research into ways to get more use out of the water we have (and ways to get more water into the area) would also be helpful.
- Technology–The community needs research and development of reproducible, BSD/MIT/GNU-licensed technologies for improved business processes. For example, programmable robots would be an option. Technologies that are developed with public funds should always be licensed under open-source licenses and be freely usable by taxpayers (at least those of said jurisdiction). This will enable the development of a zone for seeding low environmental-impact technology SLOBs. The best thing would be for the County of San Bernardino and the local cities & town to provide managerial and financial assistance in exchange for an agreement to stay in the area for up to ten years (if the business is still open by that time), hiring local residents for any open positions. This isn’t much more than what is already given to large out-of-area companies, except that those out-of-area companies tend to leave when things get rough.
- Vocational training–This would be applied technology taught in conjunction with the two community colleges. Since SCLA is just North of a large federal corrections complex, there would probably be some federal funding available for “rehabilitating” some of their inmates. Apple Valley airport is not too far from large retail chain’s area distribution center and I also believe the County of San Bernardino has a small correctional facility (or maybe youth correctional facility) a couple of miles North of the airport.
- Military re-entry & vocational rehabilitation–with so many of our young people going overseas to fight in wars, there is a large group of people that are or will be returning to this country without any usable civilian job skills. Many of them will have physical or emotional damage from their tours of duty. Building a large re-entry facility and offering to help the Departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs re-acclimate these individuals into society can only help our locality as well as the whole of American society.
- Foreign Languages–Assuming that the military re-entry program flies, there would be a pool of people who have been exposed to foreign languages and cultures. The area could utilize that to build competencies in international cultural understanding in partnership with local school systems. In addition to Middle Eastern languages and cultures (Arabic, Kurdish, Hebrew, Farsi, and so on), it would be great, for example, to bring in real Japanese residents to come and instruct high school and college students in Japanese language and culture. Ideally, each class would be a yearlong immersion, including a two-week trip to said country.
There is a reason why so many local graduates leave the area. However, with some serious effort by CSUSB, SB County, and the local town+cities & educational institutions, this can be a place that attracts ambitious people.
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Tags: economicdevelopment, education, high desert, victor valley, csusb, vvc
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Posted in Political, Small Business at 16:21 by lnxwalt
Definition: A SLOB is a Small, Locally-Owned Business.
SLOBs are the cure for many of the ills that America is currently experiencing. For example, the distortions caused by letting big companies take over the entertainment industries are behind the DMCA. As smaller companies that have fewer resources for “undue influence” of the political process take over the field, such anti-consumer legislation can be overturned.
SLOBs tend to employ local staff members, support local education and non-profits, and pay taxes to local governments.
SLOBs are closely tied to the local economy, so their owners tend to be in favor of things that they see as strengthening that local economy in the near and medium time frame. SLOBs are often family-owned businesses (FOBs), too.
We support SLOBs. We wonder why our government agencies, funded by taxes that SLOBs pay, do not support SLOBs. Perhaps big tax-evading corporations have too much influence in our political process.
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Tags: smallbusiness
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07.14.07
Posted in Political, Small Business at 21:21 by lnxwalt
For the first part of this series, check out “Can We Have Security Without Idiocy?”.
What is your business? What product do you make? What service do you offer? How has the increased focus on security and blame-tracking affected the way you do business?
Let’s think about this. Think about all the background checks that you probably do on your employees. What do they typically find? That your applicant drank a lot of alcohol during college? To be sure, there are times when a background check will turn up something unsavory in a person’s past. However, think about the spy rings that infested (and probably still infest) our nation’s military weapons industry (probably the most background-checked jobs on earth) and that of the United Kingdom. Which is not to say that these checks cannot be helpful, but they are flawed by the idea that one’s future actions are predictable by what one is known to have done in the past.
Think about your teen years and maybe even your twenties. If you are like many Americans, those were times filled with all sorts of exploration and experiences, doing things that you not only would not do today, but things that you don’t even approve of anymore. What if your daughter was to decide to do some of the exact same things (in whatever modern incarnation they go by) that you did twenty or thirty years ago? How would you react?
Exactly.
You turned out okay. You have not killed anyone or robbed any banks. You work hard, maybe a little too many hours. Then you go home and try to spend a few minutes with the kids before bedtime and then you try to finish some leftover work before you also collapse, exhausted, into bed.
The point is, people are dynamic — we are ever-changing. While you are capable in theory of drinking a quart of schnapps at one time again, you know that you really cannot do it anymore. If someone were to categorize you as an alcohol abuser based on what you did during your college years, that person would do you a disservice as well as waste his or her time trying to monitor your (greatly-reduced) consumption.
I knew someone in high school who had an interesting father. The dad had fled from his homeland after participating in a “national liberation” movement. Yet, here in this country, he married and had children. He wrote poetry. He bought a little house where his kids could play in a treehouse in the backyard. PAST=violence; PRESENT=harmonious family living. Even after his former country won its independence, he stayed in America where he had the lovely family thing going on. I never knew him to be a threat, and I believe that two of the three kids went into law enforcement.
There was a young guy named Kevin who became well-known for breaching computer systems. In fact, rumor has it that the movie War Games is loosely based on one of his adventures. After a prison term, he was forbidden to touch or use computer or network equipment. The question is, how much of his old technical knowledge is relevant today? How much of a threat is he, and could we not put his knowledge to positive use instead of trying to block him out?
Side note: I would not be able to conform to this kind of punishment. My natural interest and curiosity for all things computer would compel me to learn about both current and upcoming technology.
He has been able to start a security consultancy, based on the non-technology skills that he used to accomplish his former feats. Still, he might be an even more effective security consultant if he had been able to maintain and update his technical skills.
Are there some things you did when you were in high school or college which you do not wish to see on the evening news? How would you feel if one of those silly acts suddenly blocked you from advancing in your career or possibly even cost you your job?
In other words, when you look at someone’s history, you also have to look at the person’s present. If they do not appear to line up, it may be that the history is no longer relevant. Now if we can only get certain policy-makers to understand this.
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07.05.07
Posted in Political, Small Business at 4:06 by lnxwalt
During the course of human events, power and wealth often become concentrated in the hands of a small subset of the population. When they are allowed to have inordinate influence in the governance and economy of the land, this becomes self-perpetuating. At this point, the unscrupulous and dishonest begin to have long-term prosperity and the honest, hard-working, and productive become a permanently subservient class in that society.
This evil, when it occurs, must be firmly and quickly corrected, lest society collapse from within. When the rewards for hard work go solely to the wealthy, then employees and others who are not wealthy begin to curtail their output. Society in general begins to suffer.
In some countries, without a long tradition of using civil means for seeking change, disorder and violence are the result. We thank God we have not had that here.
We, the people that own, work for, and aspire to own small businesses here in the United States of America hold these truths to be self-evident:
- That smaller, locally-owned businesses provide more jobs to more people than the big corporations
- That smaller, locally-owned businesses are more involved in their local communities, providing not only money, but time, skills, personnel, leadership, and advocacy for the needs of local non-profits, educational institutions, individuals, and local government agencies
- That locally-owned businesses and locally-based workforces are more likely to be concerned and involved in economic, social, and political situations in their communities and to share the local perspective on relevant issues
- That locally-owned businesses are more likely to stay in a community during a downturn, being better neighbors than huge corporations that come and go as their own interests dictate
- That local government and residents need to be aware of the benefits that come from locally-owned businesses and to seek out locally-owned suppliers for most of their needs
- That locally-owned businesses provide local jobs for local residents and that therefore choosing to patronize locally-owned businesses brings beneficial employment (with its social and economic effects) to their local communities
- That many of the pressing social issues we face today are partly effects of the preference for large, out-of-area corporations over locally-owned businesses
- That solving these pressing social issues will necessarily include overturning the preference for large, out-of-area corporations in favor of supporting the locally-owned businesses that have the strongest incentives to help solve these problems
Therefore, we request that local governments (city, village, town, township, borough, county, parish) and state governments work to prefer small, locally-owned businesses for all of their outside spending and simplify their purchasing and contracting processes so that smaller, locally-owned businesses can more easily meet their requirements. We request that our leaders turn down special requests by large corporations that may have adverse effects on smaller, locally-owned businesses as well as local residents. We request that our leaders turn down election campaign funds from large, out-of-area corporations and publicly announce which ones attempted to use their money to influence the course of local events.
Small businesses are not all led by the dildoes that resent any proposal to improve life for working Americans and local residents. While we have limits on what we can afford, there are many so-called “small business coalitions” that are secretly funded by large corporations that are trying to avoid their paying their fair share. They will fight any requirement in the name of “protecting small businesses from burdensome regulations,” while they secretly export more jobs to overseas workers without our system of legal protections. While smaller, locally-owned businesses are crucial parts of the tax infrastructure, many large corporations work the backrooms and play the loopholes in order to avoid paying taxes.
Ignore these ersatz small business coalitions and talk to individual small, locally-owned businesses in your own communities.
Instead of spending thousands or even millions of dollars to attract out-of-area corporations (which somehow wind up expecting tax incentives that are paid by increasing the taxes on local residents and the smaller locally-owned businesses that are already supporting the area), spend economic development funds helping to train and finance the local entrepreneurs that will hire your local high school graduates and help out in your local elementary schools. Instead of trying (generally unsuccessfully) to attract large, out-of-area corporations to invest in our inner cities, decide on a strategy that places the creation and building of smaller, locally-owned businesses at its core.
Do these things not because they benefit us, but because by benefiting us they also benefit the individual residents and citizens that live in our communities.
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Tags: politics, small business, independence day
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06.17.07
Posted in Political at 2:38 by lnxwalt
Imagine if your town’s water district could not communicate with the water district in the next city, and neither of them could communicate with the sewer district. Further, imagine that they were all using the same brands of radios and the same brands of software. Could this cause loss or hardship? You know it.
Imagine if the space shuttle used 108050 kHz FM for its radios, while the space station used 98050 kHz AM, and the Russian space capsules used 102350 kHz SSB. How could they coordinate a docking maneuver? You would see a three-way collision, with all three vehicles breaking up and raining down fragments across a large swath of the globe.
This is where standards, open standards come in. Perhaps the standard will say that the local state police / highway patrol will have a channel that all other police agencies in the state must have the capability to utilize. So a chase that crosses a jurisdictional boundary is easily passed on to the proper agency, even before the news copters come overhead. Perhaps the standard will say that fire departments must use equipment (for example hydrant openings) that match specific common sizes of adapters for firehoses. Perhaps the standard will specify file formats and network protocols that emergency response agencies must use for their connections and communications between agencies. Perhaps the standard will apply to contractors and their work-product.
In any case, a standard is really best if it is set by a vendor-neutral group. For example, several years back, it was difficult to use many Web sites unless you were using the site’s chosen browser. If your chosen browser was different than their chosen browser, you sometimes got a horrid mess and sometimes got a message telling you to upgrade to the other product. (If you want a contemporary example of that, use Konqueror to visit the Yahoo home page.)
Now, at least, most sites are making some effort at working with multiple browsers. This can entail gobs of contingency code to handle compatibility, or sites can be written using Web standards such as XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Because no browser is 100% standards-compliant yet, even a standards-based site will needs some compatibility code, but it is lessened if the site adheres to open standards for Web development.
How would you feel if the use of a particular brand of proprietary software that did not adhere to open standards caused the IRS to reject your tax return? What if the government already knew that it needed to adopt open standards, but lobbyists for proprietary companies (with their own “secret sauce” file formats and network protocols) were able to prevent it?
The point of this is that there are potentially devastating, even deadly, consequences that come with using anything other than open, industry-standard file formats and network protocols. What if the governor sends a pardon by e-mail attachment (in a proprietary format, of course) and the warden cannot read it (because he can not open that format) before your execution? I am certain that there are not only theoretical events, but also actual events, where the lack of interoperability that happens when open and vendor-neutral standards are not used brings harm to someone.
In my opinion, an open standard needs to meet a few criteria in order to be useful:
- Open specification — the specification should be openly published and available; specifications are best when they are controlled by an independent (vendor-neutral) group within the industry.
- Clear of legal obstacles — any parties that may own relevant patents or other “intellectual property” rights that may affect the standard need to be identified and need to clearly state the criteria for usage of said rights
- Sufficiently detailed — A skilled person within the industry should be able to develop an implementation primarily from reading the specification
- Sufficiently generic — Implementers need some leeway in what they do and how they do it. If a spec is over-specified, or if there are legal obstacles for partial implementations, it becomes a problem
- Multiple implementations — in addition to a reference implementation (which generally should be open source if we are talking of software), there should be other implementers of a spec.
Beware of large vendors trying to tell you that their chosen formats and protocols are “standards”. Beware of government agencies specifying a “standard” that only one vendor can meet. If the standard is not controlled by a vendor-neutral group or if there is only one implementation of that standard, you are putting your company or your city (or county, state, or whatever) in the control of that vendor. Do you trust them? Really? Completely and totally? With the crown jewels?
I said it this way on XML.com:
Never forget the vendor-neutral part, because without it the switching cost makes choosing a vendor a high-stakes decision and subjects consumers to all sorts of abusive treatment from their suppliers (the vendors and those who distribute the products / services of the vendors)
Smaller businesses have to satisfy customers. Otherwise, those customers will quickly be gone. Larger companies have a cushion, so they can persist for years without really even trying to satisfy their customers. This is one reason why smaller companies like to base their offerings around the standards of their industries. In a larger company, customers sometimes have no choice but to pay the price and use the product, regardless of whether they like it, so those companies often use proprietary “extensions” to lock customers in.
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04.12.07
Posted in Industry News, Political at 3:06 by lnxwalt
Bytesfree and “o(blog n)” tell us how shocking it is that Microsoft is sending out an e-mail message trying to stir up a fake grassroots effort to keep California dependent upon their file formats (and therefore, their software).
As O(Blog N) puts it, “This bill is common sense. This will be in the best interest of any organization, any industry, and technology in general.” If Microsoft opposes the use of an open, standardized file format that is supported by multiple vendors and controlled by a standards group
Is Microsoft seriously attempting a campaign to kill AB 1668? This would be outrageous! Not only would it be counter to common sense, but the bill doesn’t preclude the use of Microsoft applications anyway. It would just mean that Microsoft would have to use a file format that meets some common sense requirements. Microsoft is currently lobbying for acceptance of its Office Open XML (OOXML) format. ECMA approved this and it’s now before ISO/IEC. The OOXML spec is an unprecedented 6000 pages and is ridiculously contradictory to openness and standards …
The text of the bill:
SECTION 1. Section 11541.1 is added to the Government Code, to read:
11541.1. (a) Beginning on or after January 1, 2008, all
documents, including, but not limited to, text, spreadsheets, and presentations, produced by any state agency shall be created, exchanged, and preserved in an open extensible markup language-based, XML-based file format, as specified by the department. When deciding
how to implement this section, the department in its evaluation of open, XML-based file formats shall consider all of the following features:
(1) Interoperable among diverse internal and external platforms and applications.
(2) Fully published and available royalty-free.
(3) Implemented by multiple vendors.
(4) Controlled by an open industry organization with a
well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.
(b) Beginning on or after January 1, 2008, state agencies shall start to become equipped to accept all documents in an open, XML-based file format for office applications, and shall not adopt a file format used by only one entity.
(c) The department shall develop guidelines for state agencies to follow in determining whether existing electronic documents need to be converted to an open, XML-based file format. The department shall
consider all of the following:
(1) The cost of converting electronic documents.
(2) The need for the documents to be publicly accessible.
(3) The expected storage life of the documents.
California’s financial future is at stake. Microsoft is not the enemy—they just have a monopoly cash-cow to protect—but we, especially those of us who live and pay taxes in California, need to give our state the upper hand over its vendors.
For those who say, “I disagree with the state forcing Microsoft to change their file formats,” the state is doing no such thing. Microsoft will choose to support ODF (ISO/IEC 26300) because they want to continue selling software to government customers. Government customers, like any other customers, have the right to set criteria for their purchases.
In return, vendors have the right to decide whether to meet those criteria. In the case of AB 1668, the specific file format is not named. Instead, a few common-sense criteria are set, which are already met by ODF and which MS-OOXML (or Ecma 376, as it currently exists) can not currently meet. Since government purchases are about 10% of the market for shrink-wrap software, I would expect that Microsoft will give up their stubbornness and do what is best for customers, which is support the standard (ODF).
In this case, the interests of smaller businesses, state agencies, and citizens of California are all on the side of AB 1668. On the other side are the interests of Microsoft and them alone. California should choose the former and let Microsoft worry about the latter. Hearings begin April 17. For yourself, your children, and your neighbors, please contact your state senator and assemblyperson to express your support for AB 1668.
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04.07.07
Posted in FLOSS, Political, Small Business at 22:58 by lnxwalt
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.
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03.31.07
Posted in Political, Small Business at 4:00 by lnxwalt
Something happens. Whether it was your company’s fault or not, you are now in crisis mode. The PR group wants to say something along the lines of “there was a problem, but it was limited to this and that areas”. The problem is, you do not know how widespread the problem is, what products or locations it may affect. What do you do?
Your legal department is now on the line. Mr. Legal Beagle reminds you that admitting fault and taking responsibility could have legal consequences when people decide to sue. He agrees with the PR group–limit what you admit to, until you are absolutely sure that the problem goes beyond what you’ve spoken.
Unfortunately, this is the way the game is played. In large businesses, where shrewd lawyers can deflect claims even where members of the public have legitimately been harmed, maybe this can be a successful tactic. In a smaller, owner-managed business, “playing the game” can mean the end of the business. Your best bet is to be brutally honest: “We do not know how far this reaches yet, so we urge you to avoid anything on this list….”
We need to learn some “Lessons From Pet Food.”
I spent nearly an hour on the phone with Pedigree today. We had recently switched brands of dog food and have been trying to keep track of what is or is not good to feed to the dogs and cats. Currently, we have both Pedigree and Purina dry food (no wet food). We wanted to make sure that none of our pet foods were made by the contractor in question–since they change the scope of this thing almost daily, I’d rather not have anything to do with their products for a while–and have been calling repeatedly to try to talk to someone to ask.
All I wanted to know is this: is $PRODUCTNAME made by $CONTRACTOR? It should not take repeated telephone calls over a period of days to get the answer to that question.
No well-run company should make this mistake. Make it easy to find out whether your customers are affected by the problem–and I do not mean PR bullshit–meaning everything that YOU know, THEY should know.
Purina also had a long telephone wait, but in their case, their Web site clearly said that they make almost all of their own products. Because Purina made it clear and Pedigree made it difficult, we are now a Purina household.
I want to take this opportunity to propose a solution that would have made it much easier to find out what I wanted to know: Congress: The FDA should have required many years ago that all consumer foodstuffs (that is, food for humans or pets) be clearly marked in plain English with (1) the name of the company whose brand it is sold under, (2) the name of the company that actually made and / or packaged the product, (3) the location where the product was made and / or packaged, and (4) the “USE BY” date, in ISO-standard YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM format. Since they refuse to do this, I urge you to do their job for them. Require this for all food products entering the consumer market on or after January 1, 2008 (or 2008-01-01 00:00).
Please take this opportunity to contact your congressional representatives, referring them to this page if necessary.
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03.21.07
Posted in Legal Issues, Political at 21:57 by lnxwalt
Spent some time at the county law library, checking into incorporation. We are a nation of laws, as well as all sorts of compliance enforcement staffers in a multitude of different agencies. If you have not checked on your legal compliance recently, now is a good time to look into that.
Are you properly registered, licensed, insured, and taxed? If not, it is time to make plans to rectify that. Your business—and your freedom—are on the line.
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