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ODF is important. So What Went Wrong? Response to Jeremy Allison: Having participated in a number of government pilot studies, I must say that you are right; government officials do care about ODF. They really want it to work. But they also had expectations that ODF simply wasn't designed for. What they expected ODF to be was an open technology based on highly-structured XML markup that was application, platform, and vendor-independent, backward compatible, universally interoperable, and importantly, Web ready. That is not ODF nor is it OOXML. In fact, the closest thing we have for meeting these expectations is an ajax-webkit style HTML+ (HTML5, CSS4, SVG/Canvas, JS jQuery, etc.). ODF is highly structured, but it is not application-independent. .....

How Does Word Web App Get Better With Silverlight? Faster load performance, since typically fewer bytes need to be downloaded before showing the document. Improved text fidelity at 100% zoom. This includes better text spacing and rendering. Greatly improved text fidelity at other zoom levels not 100%. Text will respect settings set in cleartype tuner, so you're able to determine how much (if any) cleartype you'd like to see. The cleartype tuner is available on the web for older versions of Windows, and is included in Windows 7. Improved accuracy of hit highlighting in Find.

It fits just fine for most of the spec but there are also major chunks that include descriptive element and attribute names, for example, the compatibility markup volume. My sense is that these are areas where new features were introduced in Office 2007. But they kind of fly in the face of the Microsoft claims back when that the abbreviated markup was deliberately chosen to maximize execution speed. If so, why isn't all the markup in abbreviated form?

This article left me a bit confused. The author poses an important question about the next release of MSOffice; MSOffice 2010. Or what others have called MSOffice 11. The question is whether or not end users will buy into the new features, and continue on the upgrade treadmill as they have for the past 15 years or so. Strangely though, there is no discussion of the traditional factors binding end users to the upgrade treadmill. Things like ever changing formats, protocols and interfaces. Nor is there discussion as to the impact of marketplace demands that Microsoft comply with open standards; including open document exchange formats like ODF, OOXML and HTML+ (the advanced WebKit-Ajax document model).

The thing is, it's more than simple "inertia" that compels people to jump on the upgrade treadmill. The ODF pilot studies conducted in Massachusetts, California, Denmark and Belgium brought into sharp focus the difficulties workgroups have in replacing MSOffice. Years of client/server systems designed to run within the MSOffice productivity environment has left many a business process bound to the MSOffice suite of editors and the compound documents they produce.

I left my response in the reader feedback section of this CIO article.

".....In the past, the MSOffice upgrade treadmill was unavoidable due to the file format compatibility problem. As workgroups and business divisions purchased new computers with newer versions of MSOffice, resulting file format incompatibilities made workflow exchange of documents impossibly frustrating. Eventually, entire workgroups were forced into upgrading just to keep day to day business processes working....."

What an amazing conversation. It's true that ODF was NOT designed to be compatible with MSOffice and the legacy binary format. That's not to say there were not considerable efforts within the OASIS Open Office XML TC (ODF) pushing for compatibility. But Sun successfully held off these efforts, insisting that ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice or the MSOffice binaries. Many asked the obvious question, "How are end users supposed to convert their information (billions of legacy "in-process" binary documents) to ODF if ODF is not designed for that conversion?" Stellent, represented by Phil Boutros, and Corel, represented by Paul Langille and Tom Magliery, were particularly obsessed with this problem. Without "compatibility", how were end users supposed to convert their documents? Needless to say, Sun prevailed. ODF is 100% perfectly compatible with OpenOffice/StarOffice, by design. It is not compatible with the billions of "in-process" compound business documents essential to world trade, commerce and information exchange. What a shame, ~ge~

The New York State "OASIS approval is good enough for us" position has considerable tension with the Agreement on Technical Barriers to Trade ("ATBT") ratified by the U.S. pursuant to the Uruguay Round Agremeents Act, 19 U.S.C. 2503 and Presidential signature, and are therefore "the law of this land." Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines Co., 516 U.S. 217, 226 (1996). Relevant ATBT provisions are Article 2.4 (member nations must use appropriate international standards where they exist or parts of them as their technical regulations; I don't see an applicable exception); and 3.1 (member nations required to take such reasonable measures as may be available to them to ensure compliance by "local government and non-governmental bodies within their territories" with the provisions of Article 2). http://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/17-tbt_e.htm New York State is a "local government" within the meaning of the ATBT. Likewise, a New York State decision to adopt a standard for its internal use is a technical regulation. See definition 1 in ATBT Annex 1 and the holding in regard to the term's meaning by the WTO Appellate Council in the case of EC Asbestos, http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds135_e.htm (para. 66-70 in the HTML version). Given that we have two relevant international standards, ISO/IEC:26300 and ISO/IEC:29500, it would seem that legally, mere "OASIS approval is [NOT] good enough" for New York State. Some people just don't get that the ATBT was intended to force government action to remove unnecessary obstacles to international trade (such as interoperability barriers) rather than just to rubber-stamp the status quo ante. The Feds have the enforcement responsibility here.

Re "reference implementation," if you check this video of a Rob Weir presentation, at about 44 minutes, he states: " "ISO doesn't have the concept of a reference implementation." http://ooocon-kiberpipa.kiberpipa.org/media/index-2007.html#ODF_Interoperability_Robert_Weir But if you check his slides from the same presentation, at slide 22 we find, "Let's work to make OpenOffice.org be the full reference implementation for ODF!" http://www.robweir.com/blog/publications/Interoperability-Barcelona.pdf An ODF "reference implementation" controlled by a single vendor, Sun Microsystems, through its padlock on the code commit rights? Sounds like a moving interoperability target to me that a standards development organization has no control of. Not ISO. Not OASIS. The implementation tail should wag the standard dog according to Weir. Too bad New York State fell for that piece of baloney.

"What's less likely to be out for display are Box's miserable finances, its delayed IPO and talk of increasing competition from industry giants like Microsoft, EMC, Google, Citrix, VMWare, Amazon and fellow Sync and Share startup Dropbox. Though you certainly don't see Levie sweating in public, he has to be feeling the heat. Consider that one year ago analyst Forrester gave Box the pole position in the Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) space, by last month Gartner tagged it as the third of four leaders in its Magic Quadrant for EFSS."

"The enterprise ain't what it used to be. That's the message from Google today as it changes the branding of its business products from Google Enterprise to Google At Work. The new brand will be applied to the business version of Google Apps (including Gmail), the Google Cloud Platform, and the Google Search Appliance, among other products. Featured Resource Presented by Citrix Systems 10 essential elements for a secure enterprise mobility strategy Best practices for protecting sensitive business information while making people productive from Learn More Amit Singh, the president of Google at Work, explained why Google is changing the name now, more than 10 years after the company began selling products -- initially the Search Appliance and Gmail for Domains -- to businesses. "Corporate is normally associated with long sales cycles, centralized purchasing, and software that sits on a shelf. Many of the things associated with the word 'enterprise' are not what we do. The dissonance kept growing bigger." In other words, the big shift in business technology over the last ten years -- from centralized IT buying products and forcing them down the throats of users, to users choosing their own tools for work regardless of what IT wants them to use -- has been the big driver of Google's enterprise business. Now the company wants to embrace that trend by abandoning what it sees as a legacy term with negative associations for many users. Google at Work security director Eran Figerbaum told the story of how he joined Google in 2007, and it reflects this shift perfectly."

"The German city of Munich, long one of the open-source community's poster children for the institutional adoption of Linux, is close to performing a major about-face and returning to Microsoft products. Featured Resource Presented by Riverbed Technology 10 Common Problems APM Helps You Solve Practical advice for you to take full advantage of the benefits of APM and keep your IT environment Learn More Munich's deputy mayor, Josef Schmid, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung that user complaints had prompted a reconsideration of the city's end-user software, which has been progressively converted from Microsoft to a custom Linux distribution - "LiMux" - in a process that dates back to 2003."