Status Quo: What Cost?

Save money...YAWN...with ODF.

The Danes are zeroing in on the costs of different permutations of office suites & file formats (John Goetze kindly reports). (Note that Massachusetts, too, has its own cost model done by some good blokes at EDS which will benefit the Commonwealth's Executive Department agencies.) The cost savings from shifting to ODF will, of course, grab the attention of the public and public servants, and it will become the most interesting feature for many of a universal, portable & open file format for documents.

But what of the productivity gains -- the significant REVERSE COSTS / OPPORTUNITY GAINS -- from pushing desktop data into a format owned by the Commons? What of the budgetary control issuing from ODF's release of the Monopoly's pernicious lock (upgrade decision processes become internal)? What of the smoother, faster document turn-around?

What of it, eh?

These will be the gains which bubble beneath the surface -- those hard to quantify which no one discusses -- while those using ODF are simply thrilled to be able to collaborate and share documents that they can open without Monopoly approvals.

Comments

[Rob Weir]

Makes me wish I could read Danish.

You raise a good point that there are intangibles, like opportunity costs, that cost/benefit models often ignore. The question of sovereignty is another, as well as public access and the long-term readability of document records.

A possible parallel is the switch to Daylight Savings Time. The benefits, to the health and happiness of factory workers, of setting the clocks back in the summer, had been preached for many years, but the obvious costs of switching outweighed the harder-to-quantify benefits. So nothing happened. It was not until WWI came along that the projected savings in gas lighting forced the issue, and nations, first Germany, then England, set their clocks back. In doing so they received the obvious cost savings, but they also experienced the intangible benefits first hand and saw all the dire predictions of the opponents fail to materialize. When the war ended, some nations decided to stay with Daylight Savings Time for those benefits. Now most of the world does it.

So although the early adopters were driven purely by the cost savings, they stayed, and were joined by the mainstream, for the intangible benefits.

So I wouldn't be suprised if the first to move to OpenDocument will be those who are hardest pressed to generate cost savings, but then over time, the other less tangible benefits will become evident, and those benefits push adoption to new levels.

[Sam]

Rob-

Thank you for this invaluable insight from the periphery of industrial history...which, I might suggest, is hardly peripheral.

Through the early reactions to ODF of the most cost-sensitive (as well as document-sensitive) accounts we find our way across The Chasm.