Category Archives: OOXML

Links for mid-February

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Some predictions for 2010

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This will be the last post of the year 2009.  2010 will be an interesting year to come, for many reasons, and that’s why I have outlined a few predictions below for the year to come. Feel free to comment or add to this list, and happy new year 2010!

  • OpenOffice.org’s market share will ceased to be constantly looked down upon by analysts. I had recently explained why measuring its market share is complex, and why it is constantly underrated. But now it seems that Microsoft (and the press) are taking good notice of the fast-growing adoption of OpenOffice.org by, well, pretty much everyone out there.
  • Standardization of the most recent release of OpenDocument, the 1.2, will be painful, and might perhaps never see a happy ending. For one thing, Microsoft controls the ISO through seemingly fortuitous and massive participation in every national standards bodies forming the ISO, and the ISO’s JTC 1 seems to have decided that the world should be content with some sort of ODF 1.1 “plus plus”. Note that this ODF 1.1 is not a bad thing in itself, but it is very much the result of connivings against ODF and everything non-Microsoft. You never should bite the hand that feeds you, after all…
  • The lpOD project, already well underway, will be a success and might become one of the main references for the ODF ecosystem.
  • Second Life, the largest online virtual world or metaverse will have to innovate again, or will lose its customers progressively to the new show in town, “Blue Mars“.
  • It’s almost becoming a cliché, but cloud computing will again be part of the hype in 2010 and gain a strong momentum on the market. Among many challenges, there is the fundamental need for portability and openness of the users’ data, its control by these very users, and more generally the increasingly clear divide between centralized and decentralized data architecture. In the end, this will become political, and as important, if not more, than the freedome to code and its sharing.
  • In the aftermath of the Bilski case, there seems to be a consensus that the criteria for “software patentability” will be much more demanding in the U.S. Of course, a few illuminated curmudgeons inside the European sphere of power, influenced by pro-patent lobbieswill fight hard to implement software patents in its whole horror. But in the end, what we need to do is not being satisfied with raising the bar on patentability criteria, we need to get the message straight and clear that software patents are not acceptable anywhere. ACTA anyone?
  • Arch Linux will continue its growth among technical and power users (I’m one of them) while Ubuntu will stagnate (unless Canonical opens its online media store), OpenSuse somewhat loses users, Fedora will grow its userbase, Mandriva will make a strong comeback if they manage to secure their business. How do I know all this? I’ve been in the Linux distributions business, punditry and expertise for quite some time (since 2002, actually) and if there’s something you can count on over the long term, it’s… the Distrowatch billboard. This thing has never proved to be really wrong. I’ll cover more of these topics in 2010. Meanwhile, have a great New Year’s Eve and a happy new year to you!

Politicians, lobbyists and scapegoats: When choosing not to choose should make you vote the next time

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The famous and much awaited RGI (Référentiel Général d’Interopérabilité) has officially been published and enacted. This announcement was met with mixed reactions and as I have been following the RGI for quite a few years now, I thought I would write some of my thoughts about it.

The RGI is actually old, not just because it was already online as a final draft in May 2009, but because the RGI as a project dates back several years. Its story goes like this: Somewhere in 2006 the decision is made by the French government to draft a public sector-wide policy on IT matters. This policy is to be published in several parts, one on security, another on accessibility and the last one on interoperability. The last one, called the RGI, is published as a draft on the same year and submitted for public comments on a wiki, which was at the time something daring and courageous. The feedback that was received was ominously  good. In fact the first version of the RGI was mandating the use of Open Standards, and most notably ODF throughout the whole administration. At that very moment, Microsoft decided it was time to intervene and through a violent strategy of pressure and influence, managed to repel the RGI and have the process restarted. The process did restart and the same document finally got finalized for official approval in 2007. There the RGI progressively fades away, partly because of the presidential elections taking place in France at that time, partly because of a strongly applied pressure from the outside.

The freshly elected government seems to have not so fresh ideas about I.T. Its track record in the matter is probably one of the worst possible as it is the one who authored and championed the Hadopi law (the french three strikes system) and other network censorship legislation. Any communication system that is not controlled by the Hungarian director of police  glory of our nation, the President, is progressively being put under his control.  In this context one could believe that the RGI would have lost not time being reexamined again. The exact opposite happened, partly because of the neo-conservative bias of the new government who seems to believe in the omnipotence of markets vs State intervention, partly because of a strange proximity with Microsoft (four ministers inaugurated the new Microsoft offices in Paris!) and a common hatred of Google. In this context, the people in charge of drafting the RGI discovered they were deprived of any political support. Moreover, they also realized that the opportunity for a clear policy drafting had gone away. They are public servants, after all, and public servants cannot do a lot without the support of the politicians in power.

This is how we come to the present RGI. The document by itself has been totally rewritten, choosing to leave aside the policy aspect in favor of an exhaustive referencing and classifying of existing technology and standards.  This document itself integrates well with the upper echelons of European interoperability framework and does not attempt to dictate what the public sector stakeholders should do. On the crucial question of the office file formats, it is obvious that the authors spent some time carefully choosing their words. While the use of xml-based file format is clearly recommended, ODF is being put under observation (the reason for this is unclear) and so is OOXML, but at least we know the reason for this: OOXML has no known implementation (and won’t have any until a long time, they might have added) and therefore cannot be used.

This is what happens when a government is fiddling too much with powerful corporations and forget the interest of its own people: honest, competent, public servants have to compose with whatever they have in order to keep things going. If I were to judge this document from this standpoint only, I would actually give it a big cheer.The problem is that the whole concept of the RGI has become somewhat of a loaded gun in France, and it is I believe useless to use people of the DGME as scapegoats. With what they have, they could not have done better. But what was at stake was an opportunity for France to become a champion of open standards and sustainable digital future. It’s sad to see this government never gave it a chance. I hope one day we will realize that the ideological bias against any form of openness entertained by the present President and Prime Minister is something akin to the outrageous denial of global warming by the previous U.S. administration.I look forward to the future versions of the RGI, and think they will bring more constructive, innovative and positive elements to the development of a coherent information infrastructure  for our national public sector.

Rumours of Microsoft becoming more frequentable seem greatly overrated

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Just back from the OOoCon I was taking some times reading my email and I am afraid what I saw does not push me into believing that Microsoft has amended much of its ways. I guess we cannot do much about it, and it’s Halloween season anyway.

  • Just when we thought the European Commission was leading the way in getting rid of proprietary and foreign technology, helping Europe master its digital independence, the second draft of the EIF v2 (European Interoperability Framework) got leaked last week.  The draft contents are nothing short of appalling. Open Standards are simply erased from the document and Open Source seems to be considered as some shameful condition that needs to be discarded as a possible option for the European digital infrastructure, and reading in between the lines one may get the perception that it might just all be easier in a pure Microsoft environment. I understand that some people are whispering in the corner that Jonathan Zuck stands again behind the leak, but I really have no opinion on that. Go figure who leaks the leaks. Anyway, this might keep some of its credibility if we are to believe this representative of the Polish government, who basically explains that the leaked draft is, well, not a draft but something that does not seem to emanate from the Commission. Here and there outraged reactions have been heard. The good folks at OpenForum Europe who are usually known for their moderation, have spelled it out quite clearly in this press release. Another reaction from another insider in Brussels is also quite telling of a situation where entire pieces of legislation are being hijacked by the will of lobbies while the citizens of the European Union would like more control over the Union’s growingly opaque policy making structures. Basic mental and political sanity would recommend that this leak was actually a leak of a real draft of the EIF or another manipulation by some lobbies pushing an anti-competitive agenda by sabotaging open standards and open source.
  • If that weren’t enough, Jomar Silva from the ODF Alliance Brazil has posted its latest revelations about the infamous Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) on OOXML in Geneva and how Alex Brown, its dubious convener, did everything to stop some delegations asking some interesting questions. It is amazing to see how international processes can be bent towards one and the same goal.

Halloween season, I tell you…

Killer Rabbits

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Just as I was writing that I was about to go on vacations, some story had to break about OpenOffice.org. Essentially, the news are about Microsoft discussing OpenOffice.org as a competitor. That’s interesting, usually Microsoft does not like to speak about competitors coming from the Free Software Community, except when it’s about patents on code it allegedly infringes.

So Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft makes some interesting points about OpenOffice.org; but I would also like to react about Matt Asay’s own blog about OpenOffice.org as a weak competitor to MS Office. In some way, I found Matt Asay’s blog to be very much unfair to OpenOffice.org, but I will come to that later. Microsoft’s words on OpenOffice.org are unusually fair, not so much because they take into account OpenOffice.org as a competitor, but because they describe very well the reality of the “good enough”. True, the market wants good enough products to use, especially in these troubled times. But how you measure good enough is where the devil hides (as it were, he always hides in details, doesn’t he?).

By coining the issue of the “good enough”, Kevin Turner describes perhaps unwillingly what the market wants, what the market believes it consciously wants and what it’s really running after. OpenOffice.org does not qualify as a good enough competitor office suite: this office platform has been around for a over 15 years in its different incarnations, and expert features have been around just like in MS Office. It would be perhaps good to remind that about 90% of office productivity suites users only use about 10% of the features existing in every full-fledged office suite from any vendor. What this means is that customers usually don’t use these suites to their full extent. What this also means is that “good enough” is pretty hard to define. I think it can mean two distinct things: either good enough means that products are very much interchangeable feature-wise, or it means that nobody has a clue what are the actual product requirements in order to rationally choose one and not the other.

My preference goes to the second definition. After several years of analyzing migrations and deployments of OpenOffice.org, having talked to people in charge of the migration at various level of executive positions, I can pretty much say that people often don’t know why they stick to MS Office. But they generally tend to know why they want to get away from it. Most of the time, it’s not because of a feature they would absolutely miss if they were to switch office suites; this is an argument for status quo that is often pushed forward, but 99% of these “special features” are not so special. Competitors offer the same or similar ones. But it’s fear, laziness, and issues that exist inside the organization that hinder migrations. I read Kevin Turner’s speaking Outlook as a key value in MS Office and as something that OpenOffice.org does not offer. I get the feeling two things are being completely overlooked here: You don’t pack features in software like you do with a car. This is software after all, and it’s immaterial, unlike a car. Mr Turner’s points may have been valid in the context of a car brand’s qualities compared to another. Do we really think people cannot deal with downloading a separate mail/groupware client ? If that is so, I think this is a wrong way of looking at things. The real stickiness to Outlook is the Exchange servers that lock customers and hinder them from moving to another solution, not any special features (Zimbra anyone?). And in the end, good enough also means that once you broke on through all these gimmicks, half of the market finds out it really just needs something to type in notes and letters, and do some bit of accounting. For the rest, such as presentations, either grab Apple’s Keynote if you know what you’re doing, or stick to Powerpoint or Impress if you really feel like inflicting your poor artistic tastes to the rest of your colleagues. Which does just really mean: open an account on Google Docs or Zoho. Period.

Customer lock-in is something that drive people away from MS Office. I understand that Mr Turner keynotes Microsoft’s business partners and therefore talks in terms of market opportunities; but although SharePoint may be a great business opportunity for the Microsoft ecosystem, it’s a formidable capture engine for its customers. SharePoint has slowly become the foundation of Microsoft office platform, and one should not expect any sort of openness there. It’s a bit like a mousetrap: it looks appealing, you can get in but never go out; it’s a proprietary and non-standard realm by definition.

OpenOffice.org on the other hand, has something else to offer: Freedom. Freedom to use, freedom to improve, freedom to distribute, freedom to go away. Not less money for you and more gasoline to pay for. The time for pork-barrel spending progressively comes to an end in IT. True, OpenOffice.org does not benefit from a very large partner’s ecosystem (read “ISV”) and I understand that you will not feel alone if you have just acquired your expensive license to use Outlook and Word. I’m pretty sure that someone out there will also sell you something else, like business intelligence applications that “seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office”. This usually means that their standard output is a *.csv file whose extension is renamed to “.xls” on the fly so that you can open it with Excel (or with OpenOffice.org Calc!) and send it via Outlook to your colleague next door without him gasping in horror at the sight of a new file format. That will be 354 Euros per seat my dear. By the way, are you part of these people who rename “.xlx” extensions (MS OOXML for spreadsheets) to “.xls” so that other people around can read your file and hope nobody else will notice you messed with the file format? Because if that’s the case, you are part of Microsoft’s problems.

And that’s what Matt Asay has apparently not understood. Matt’s problem here is that he reacts exactly like any open source software pundit: there’s always a good way to remind the Beardies how lame and unprofessional they are. Matt seems to be expecting that the OpenOffice.org project orders market analysis on a monthly basis. Matt seems to have some trouble understanding why an office suite that is not properly marketed with a commercial entity behind it may make inroads. Last but not least, Matt does not seem to consider OpenOffice.org (that’s OpenOffice.org to you and anybody else, Matt) as a credible competitor to MS Office. On what ground does he draw these conclusions is not clear to me. But there is something I know about Matt’s employer, Alfresco: Alfresco as a platform is a very interesting and important success for the Free and Open Source Software progress. It shows that you don’t have to be a complex, gas-guzzling, feature packed document management system to compete head to head with SharePoint. In fact, I hear Alfesco software is really popular. And Alfresco does also “seamlessly integrate” with OpenOffice.org thanks to an OpenOffice.org extension that allows you to upload and download your documents to and from the Alfresco system. Why am I telling you all this? Much of the success of Alfresco is correlated to the success of OpenOffice.org, and vice-versa. When an organization turns to an Open Source document management system, it tends to look for lower prices, affordable service fee, and no lock-in. Which means the very same organization has completed or is contemplating a migration to OpenOffice.org, which, incidentally offers the same benefit.
Who’s eating the other’s crumbs now?