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October 05, 2005
Massachusetts + OpenDocument
Recently there's been a lot of negative press over Massachusetts' proposed new policy to mandate OpenDocument file formats. Of course some argue it has the potential to change the world.
A little history...
It is truely phenomenal to watch technologies change and grow. In the late 80's and early 90's it was quite common to have text files which could be opened by any application. So too, many word processing applications (yes back then there were quite a few to choose from) had export/import functionality to support moving documents between them. But as Microsoft has thoroughly dominated the desktop space, however, it's Microsoft Word document format has become the de facto standard.
For most of the 90's and early 2000's, there wasn't a tremendous amount of debate over this. Office was available for the Macintosh, and folks using Operating Systems outside these two were a tiny minority. There was however, a consistent, and prevalent interest in using PDF files as the internet standard for documents downloadable off of websites, and in particular government websites, such as the IRS have always used that format for forms and instruction books.
OpenDocument is basically a XML based standard to describe and represent the formating in a word processing document.
So it is certainly encouraging to see real debate about these Open Standards, which in the long run would help consumers, and provide a more level playing field at least in the realm of Office applications.
It seems apt to quote a bit of Malcolm Gladwell here:
"People don't change when you tell them there is a better option. They change when they conclude that they have no other option."
Posted by admin at October 5, 2005 12:51 AM