The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has decided that all state departments and organizations should use open standards for their documents. Specifically, the open standard to be backed by the Commonwealth is OpenDocument. The OpenDocument standard, developed by OASIS, is short for the "OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications". It is a file format for saving documents such as spreadsheets, memos, or presentations. The idea is simple — to have a royalty-free, XML-based file format that any office or personal productivity program can work with and which will allow users to exchange the files with no concern that another user won’t be able to read the files. What’s not to like about that? Nothing that I can think of.
We have all experienced the frustration of receiving a spreadsheet or text document but then couldn’t open, read, or print it. Wouldn’t it be nice to have globally compatible documents that would work equally well with mainframes, Macs, PC’s, Windows, Linux, handheld devices, etc.?
There is only one opponent of the idea — Microsoft, which says that it has no plans to support OpenDocument. Microsoft also says it plans an XML approach for documents in the next release of MS Office and that it will be superior to OpenDocument.
It likely will be superior. Excel is superior to the OpenOffice spreadsheet (although PC Magazine just gave OpenOffice a very positive review – see Office Software On The Cheap). A company with the resources of Microsoft can bury us in features. What percentage of the features of MS Office are used by the average user? Five percent? Fifty percent would surely be high. There are two questions. Do standards matter? Does the "superior" feature-set that MS Office provides matter? My theory for office and personal productivity documents is "Just enough Is Good Enough" — in other words, having a standard document format that works on any kind of computer in the world is much more important than having some esoteric features that the vast majority of users will never take advantage of and which are proprietary to one company.
IBM learned this lesson the hard way. In the mid-1980’s the United States government began to issue requests for proposals which included a restriction that any proposed solution must operate on Unix. At the time, Unix was not used much in the corporate world where IBM gained most of it’s business so the company ignored the RFP’s that required Unix. The government argued that Unix was going to be the standard for all government IT and that it was important because all agencies and departments could more easily share software and data. IBM argued that it’s mainframe solutions were more robust, more scaleable, and easier to manage. After losing a lot of government business, IBM started taking Unix seriously and introduced AIX which went on to become very prevalent in not only government but also in financial services and other corporate sectors. IBM saw the light and began a transformation toward open industry standards and today is a model for leadership in Linux (the most popular flavor of Unix) and in collaborative innovation (see Irving’s blog).
What’s wrong with Microsoft providing XML support for MS Office documents? Nothing per se — the devil is in the details. It is very easy to bury some proprietary features and functions in XML. With OpenDocument, the full specification for the format of the document is in public view. No guessing and no surprises. (All 706 pages of what OpenDocument is and how it works is here).
Note: A major supporter of open industry standards is Opera Software ASA. See story about their birthday party at news.com