PlexNex: IBM

Another fine piece of expression by Joel (Spolsky) -- on software. IBM's, Goolge's & everybody's this time...

As a programmer, thanks to plummeting memory prices, and CPU speeds doubling every year, you had a choice. You could spend six months rewriting your inner loops in Assembler, or take six months off to play drums in a rock and roll band, and in either case, your program would run faster. Assembler programmers don’t have groupies.

It's called "Strategy Letter IV" and in it Joel draw's a haunting comparison between some early difficulties of word-processing in the mainframe era and today's world of AJAX.

But Ajax apps can be inconsistent, and have a lot of trouble working together — you can’t really cut and paste objects from one Ajax app to another, for example, so I’m not sure how you get a picture from Gmail to Flickr. Come on guys, Cut and Paste was invented 25 years ago.

And this about Google...

...while you’re not paying attention, everybody starts writing NewSDK apps, and they’re really good, and suddenly businesses ONLY want NewSDK apps, and all those old-school Plain Ajax apps look pathetic and won’t cut and paste and mash and sync and play drums nicely with one another. And Gmail becomes a legacy. The WordPerfect of Email.

But it's not just about Google.

One assumption Joel makes here -- and which bolsters many business plans (and one I knew intimately) -- is that bandwidth keeps growing. It may. But yesterday my Skype performance was so lousy that I had to doubt this received wisdom...for a moment.

IBM's Open Source & Open Standards poobah, Bob Sutor, offers a useful graphic on his blog which describes in abstract how information will assume the starring role in ICT architectures of the near future. Any organization looking hard at "SOA" -- like The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Governor's ICT department with its ETRM 3.5 policy -- is already moving in that direction.

The focus of ICT departments once was software; now with the help of key standards and social trends in ICT the emphasis is shifting to information -- where it belongs:

Sutor jibes Microsoft -- without mentioning the company's name:

This means that if you have software that integrates with other software and uses proprietary trade secrets to do so, you are in trouble. This means that if you are relying on de facto standards and there is really only one implementation, you are in trouble. This means that if you committed to a product that critically uses a vendor-dictated standard, you are in trouble, especially if you could have chosen an open alternative.

This refers to Microsoft's pending implementation of the open standard W3C XML markup language in its next version, Office 2007. Office 2007 will use as its default file format a certain form of open XML. You now currently are familiar with the .doc, .xls, .ppt formats to which Microsoft keeps the hidden recipes; the new ones will be different. XML is all the rage now, and the right thing to be doing. But the problem for end-users and organizations who deploy Office 2007 is that they will regret deploying it very soon after.

Office 2007 will have the snazziest features money can buy. And when Ray Ozzie's wonderwerke from Groove gets folded into the Office 2007 batter, it will have collaborative features we have not seen so well-integrated before on PCs (-- until we see the Google Desktop). These features will not be superficial, but no feature is more important than whether the file format standard -- at the core, beneath the buttons and widgets -- is fairly and openly implemented.

The trouble is there are proprietary dependencies in this new Office 2007 file format which wrap around and interact with the open XML parts. These dependencies mean that files generated in Office 2007 will always require original single-vendor applications or services in order to be fully accessed. The files coming out of Office 2007, despite having XML at the core, are about as "open" as Guantanamo Bay. This is but one expression of an anal-retentive business model, another dose of American Beauty served up the world.

Referring to Bob Sutor's graphic, you will never be able to implement that attractive multi-application scenario over your priceless information if you use Office 2007. What access you will have to the XML content in your Microsoft-dependent files will be just that, dependent upon Microsoft. This is a comical attempt at paradigm-preservation by Microsoft and what we consider to be a negation of a great deal of the "value" proposed closer to the user by the Vista stack(s).

Microsoft's commitment to such a tied regime will lead to a deeper Existential Crisis for the company in out years because this is so contrary to customer interests and good-sense ICT practise. (It's not about Microsoft going away -- never was. They will eventually absorb the new culture, but my thesis is this can only occur after a period of paralysis that's already begun with Ballmer's petulant chair-throwing tirades and the legal sticky wickets piling up again in Europe. More credit to Gates, who -- seeing ahead that the jig is up -- is off to save the world, speak regularly at Davos and rehabilitate his image.)

Microsoft officials skillfully twist semantics when they call their new Office 2007 file format "open." It's a half-truth, which is no truth at all. The open XML feature subset is what they are referring to, but their engineering of the file format breeds dependency on their software (at both the application, and the operating system level) to access those files; or, if you can get at the data, you are dependent upon features enabled only by coded ties to other parts of your system that Microsoft has sold you. More fool you; it is a luxurious snake-oil.

Bob's passive-aggressive tone in this post belies a whole generation of Microsoft's unethical tactical trade antics repeated through the Microsoft Era (1991 - 2001). This got us into an ICT cul de sac described in Nick Carr's book, Does IT Matter? (my own riff on Carr is that companies lack competitive advantage in ICT because their focus has been on software -- which was undifferentiated for everyone -- rather than information and business processes. This was so in part because systems were inflexible, data encumbered. This is everyone's fault and is being corrected by open source and open standards in key areas like open code sharing and open file formats.) Ironically, many of those tactics Microsoft learned from IBM in earlier generations leading up and even through the Gerstner era.

Sutor's/IBM's positions here, today, are justified because open document standards are bringing competition back to ICT -- increasing choice, reducing costs & so on. IBM is not being hypocrytical in supporting open document standards. These standards will help us all. It is Microsoft officials who are on a rampage to preserve their market positions against the better interests of ICT users. They should be ashamed. And they will be because the markets are more intelligent today.