The battle over OpenDocument Format has begun and Microsoft is using their traditional brass knuckles approach. It was revealed this week in some blogs that a recent article, "Massachusetts Should Close Down OpenDocument", which ran at Fox News, was written by a journalist hired by Microsoft. (See an interesting rebuttal). The stakes are high. The issue is who owns documents, the document creator or the software that was used to create the documents.
Let’s make it personal and down to earth. Mr. and Mrs. Smith and their children all have computers on the local area network at home. They recently had a busy weekend. Mr. Smith created a presentation which he will take to a conference and present using his ThinkPad. Mrs. Smith wrote a newsletter which will be distributed to dozens of members in a local non-profit organization she belongs to. The Smiths’ daughter completed a school term paper replete with graphical images, clip art, and photographs. The Smiths’ son is a graduate student in business and he developed a spreadsheet to reflect a ten-year financial plan for a new business idea. Who owns these four documents?
It seems obvious that the Smith documents should be owned by the Smiths, but are they really? What does it mean to "own" the documents? For starters ownership should mean that the Smith’s should be able to distribute the documents to friends, family, and colleagues with complete confidence that the documents can be opened and appear exactly as they were created without regard to what kind of computer or software the recipient may have. The Smiths should also have the confidence that their children’s children’s children will be able to open the documents and view them with the same fidelity. How can these goals be achieved? By utilizing an open standard for the format. That is exactly what the OpenDocument Format has achieved.
ODF does not mean the end of Microsoft Office. It may, however, mean the end of the monopoly that Office commands and the high price that Microsoft extracts from the world for Office software. In fact there is plenty of room for competition and increased competition would lead to lower prices and higher functionality. Documents have the potential to evolve to a much higher level by using tags to give them context and by utilizing web services to integrate documents with applications to streamline healthcare, education, and business processes. Documents could be popluated with information from databases and then be supplemented with data that users add and then the completed documents could be routed among multiple business processes and databases via the Internet. The potential to simplify things, reduce errors, and streamline service is enormous.
The question is who sets the pace for innovation in document handling? Assuming widespread adoption of ODF, the way in which document handling evolves will change. If a software company has an idea to improve the way documents are handled they can add or modify capabilities of their software, but if the improvement requires a change to the format of the document, then the software company must work with the open standards process and collaborate with many vendors and users to introduce the change to ODF in a way that preserves the compatibility of existing documents in perpetuity.
The model of the past was different. A vendor wanting to make an improvement in how documents are processed would develop changes to their software and then declare that the new "release" will result in a new format for the documents it creates. Documents created using other vendor’s software or even older versions of it’s own software may not be compatible. Clearly, the proprietary approach is much easier for the software company than the open collaborative approach.
Proprietary approaches have always been easier. For decades, IBM did a great job of keeping customers happy with mainframes and proprietary networking software called Systems Networking Architecture (SNA). Then came the Internet and Linux. IBM not only changed but lead the charge toward more and more open standards based technologies and collaborative innovation with universities, governments, IT companies, and it’s customers. Microsoft has done many good things too but they clearly do not want to give up their hold on the format of documents. Seems to me that the decision by Massachusetts to declare that they will only allow ODF documents in their Commonwealth will be shown to place them on the right side of history.