IBM's | Sutor's Dissonance

Bob Sutor's Warsaw deck (6 slides, PDF) is to-the-point & true with regard to this magic word, 'interoperability'. Too bad ODF isn't an interoperable format and a harmonization effort, if successful, would take another 3 years.

It reminds me of the good feelings Simon Phipps' words inspired when we could hear him talk about Sun's commitment to open source back in 2003 & 2004 when OpenOffice.org was all promise -- and Sun hadn't yet discovered its allergy to GNU/Linux.

Both parties speak well, but the evident intent on both Sun's & IBM's parts to create an alternative office suite monopoly -- a DUOPOLY (Sun & IBM on the one side, Microsoft on the other) -- through the force of rip&replace political mandates is disgraceful, and the execution lame.

Doc Searls said the great thing about open source and Free Software is that the users have taken over their own supply ("DIY-IT" | Linux Journal | 1 Feb 2004). It is high time this became true in the document space, for CIOs and policy bureaucrats who have signed up for ODF are going to get a Massachusetts comeuppence when the difficulty of deploying OpenOffice.org in a decentralized enterprise is acknowledged. (By now it would be easier to go straight to Ubuntu.)

CIOs & policy bureaucrats! Look past the ODF & OOXML miasma to the Internet -- where the problem of document interoperability can reasonably be solved.