What’s hot this summer?

I have been pretty busy these days, travelling to Brussels, London and also Bordeaux (that last one for one of my best friends’ thirtiest birthday) and as a result I haven’t had the time to blog as regularly as I wanted.

So I thought I could briefly discuss what will be “hot” this summer.

One Microsoft spokesperson has declared that ODF had won and inasmuch as I enjoyed his sentence I don’t agree with him. ODF needs to complete three major steps before one can really call it a success:

Important uptake has been witnessed for ODF, both on a government level and in absolute terms in comparison to OOXML (whatever that last term means). But we really need to push it forward to a broader audience and get it adopted more.

ODF 1.2 really needs to be released and we are late; besides that, we don’t know what Microsoft, who joined the OASIS ODF TC at the beginning of June, will do about ODF 1.2. Their decision to support ODF 1.1 is in this regard not entirely justified as ODF 1.2 will have been released months before the release of MS Office 2007 SP2 in 2009. Does Microsoft know something we don’t?

Talking about Microsoft, I just don’t know what they really wish to do within the OASIS ODF TC. We’ll see as the events unfold but something should be remembered: following the OASIS consortium’s policies, any IPR related to ODF will be neutralized after 60 days of membership of the ODF technical committee. I do locate this “IP neutralization” around the 9th of August. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

On the other hand, the development and testing of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is going on. If you have some free time this summer, consider contributing to OpenOffice.org by reporting bugs and downloading snapshots (here are the ones for Mac, by the way) .

Last but not least, two points of a more personal aspect:

Erwin Tenhumberg, a great OpenOffice.org marketer left Sun for SAP. You can find his former blog on my blogroll but it will be replaced by his new one soon. Good luck Erwin!

My father switched to Ubuntu Linux, Hardy Heron. So far some minor issues but the system works like a breeze and the laptop rocks.

Enjoy your week!