The Failure in Massachusetts...

...is the beginning of the end for ODF. It's on the ODF Community's hands.

Good backgrounder & synopsis by Roy.

Microsoft HAD to "kill" two CIO's in Massachusetts to get its fraudulent formats in OOXML accepted as policy. They needed to do it to establish a policy precedent (ODF-only turning to ODF + OOXML) and they also needed to do it to prevent all the other CIOs from attempting ODF-only policies.

What a success! There is a phrase we've heard other CIOs use for attempting an ODF-only policy -- it's called "being Quinned" (referring to Peter Quinn who was the first Massachesetts ITD CIO to be politically immobilized and shunted from office).

"Massachusetts" now means "Krystallnacht" for open standard document formats at the state government level. The silence is telling of a world of appeasement.

We expect Microsoft to behave this way. The company is pure sociopath. Not an ounce of human feeling or remorse in its genetic make-up. But the ODF Community could have saved Massachusetts by producing a device like da Vinci which enables an organization to migrate to ODF document production by costless insertion of an INTERNAL plugin into existing MS Office installations.

Why didn't Massachusetts get da Vinci when Louis Gutierrez all but demanded the vendors supply it? That is the question you should be asking before naively crying about the corrupt actions of the software monopolist. Don't waste your breath. Forty-nine other CIOs -- the customer -- couldn't care less.

The solution was in our hands and the ODF Community is still scoffing itself into oblivion.

Game-over, ODF.

Comments

[Roy Schestowitz]

I'm sure some incarnation thereof will stick.

[Zaine Ridling]

NOT game over, Sam! Remember, the most influential "platform" for future documents is the web, and for online suites, ODF has a distinct advantage for end users.

Okay, Microsoft succeeded at what they have always succeeded at — lock-in (this time for the enterprise). But this need not be so for end users. ODF makes better sense, and always will, for end users over a proprietary format. Governments ignore this plain "fact" at their own risk. From what I saw this week, they're going to be spending a lot of money over the next 25 years updating infrastructure in their states. Too bad they'll have to tell taxpayers that millions must automatically be kicked to Redmond for licensing, and to access all that nasty MS-OOXML data they might be saving to.

[Sam]

Zaine-

Couldn't agree with you more.

It's beside my point: the proactive, deliberate avoidance by the ODF Community to have ODF not interoperable with Microsoft formats makes ODF un-deployable.

ODF will not get deployed if it requires a "rip & replace" of MS Office for OpenOffice.org. It won't happen...CIOs won't try it after what happened to Peter Quinn and Louis Gutierriez. That's the lesson of "Massachusetts".

How do I know this, you ask? I was there!