The OpenDocument Format (ODF) backed by Sun and IBM, among others, has been ratified by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a necessary step on the road to formal adoption.

Microsoft still intends to pursue ISO status for its own Office Open XML format, contending that the ODF is behind in funtionality.

As written here before, this issue, like much of the rest of the debate over open source software, represents a contest between business models, not a war between good and evil. Jason Matusow, Microsoft Director of Standards Affairs, commented on this a couple of months ago:

IBM is basing their business strategy on the need to grow their consulting business. It represents >50% of their revenue stream and their CEO has spoken at length as to its importance. If your business is consulting, you need to have problems to solve. You need long-term engagements and to make sure that an ever-increasing amount of your customers' knowledge of their business is transferred to you in order to make you more valuable to them and to all other businesses in the same vertical industry. You structure your consulting contracts to retain as much (if not all) of the IP generated in the consulting engagement so that you can turn it over on the next customer for a higher margin. This is not nefarious behavior nor is it immoral. It is simply a business model and one that IBM is the absolute best at.

Microsoft's business strategy is also about earning revenue on its core business. Our model is one of selling software that represents high R&D expense up front that is monetized through the licensing of that software's use over time. Our model depends on a constant cycle of improvement of the software to justify the value of upgrading and remaining with our solution set. The biggest advantage I see in our model is the value proposed to the customer. Well made software should reduce your dependence on expensive consulting engagements by transferring more of the business processes to the shoulders of the technology rather than of the more expensive people resources. Your consulting expenses should be able to be redirected to higher-level value-add solutions rather than core infrastructure work. Again, nothing nefarious in the intent of this model, and many would argue that Microsoft has been pretty good at it.

So, this comes down to a discussion of models

Governments should be evaluating all solutions (in-house, commercial-off-the-shelf, freeware, shareware, open source, public domain) based on the technical merits and value-for-money they receive from the solution. I wonder if IBM would suggest that governments should no longer consider purchasing proprietary IBM software (approx. $15B revenue stream resulting in more than 30% of IBMs profits) because it may be built upon vendor-dictated specifications and may result in their taxation data, military secrets, etc. be "locked-in" to DB2/Websphere/Notes solutions?

The place where this debate is raging them most is around document formats. There have been numerous standardized formats as well as proprietary formats. Governments have had the ability to save their documents as ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard text, or even W3C specified HTML in any one of the many Word process products available such from Microsoft, Corel, Adobe, IBM and others. Yet, the overwhelming majority of documents were saved in the proprietary formats because they offered the most compelling feature sets (value). Due to market pressures (customer needs), Office suites offer backwards compatibility, "save as" functionality, and various types of format converters.

Now, it takes little for anyone to see from the PDF, ODF, and Open XML File Format discussions that the market is demanding an even greater commitment to standardization of file formats. Thus, vendors are reacting. Yet, it is a mistake to assume that standardization will be the end-all of interoperability. It is a good starting point, but customers will continue to value the capability of the software that produces the formats. Witness the differences between OpenOffice and IBM's Workplace. Look at the request of OpenOffice users for significant improvements in spreadsheet functionality. Look at the constant improvements in the MS Office products that reach well beyond a format. Also, vendors will need to work with each other outside of the standards fora. Microsoft and Adobe have worked out the details due to customer concerns enabling PDF to be included in O12.

posted by James DeLong @ 6:50 AM | Software

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