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Stats on Cloud usage shows that only 29% of Internet users are using a cloud service. One of the charts provided shows that iCloud (Apple) and DropBox have over 300 million users. Microsoft OneDrive has come out of nowhere to claim the third position with 250 million. And Google Drive finishes in fourth place with 200 million. Funny that Google would be so short when gMail and Chrome have proven to be so successful. And gDOCS was a pioneer of cloud based editing of productivity documents. Office 365 has only been available on iOS since May, yet look at the numbers! Incredible. Oh, Box is also listed in fifth place with 25 million users. I'm starting to think that DropBox, RackSpace and Egnyte are in big trouble. Microsoft is on a huge roll, and my gut instinct is that they have some kind of a deal going with Apple iCloud and Office365. Amazon is surprisingly missing.

Stats on Cloud usage shows that only 29% of Internet users are using a cloud service. One of the charts provided shows that iCloud (Apple) and DropBox have over 300 million users. Microsoft OneDrive has come out of nowhere to claim the third position with 250 million. And Google Drive finishes in fourth place with 200 million. Funny that Google would be so short when gMail and Chrome have proven to be so successful. And gDOCS was a pioneer of cloud based editing of productivity documents. Office 365 has only been available on iOS since May, yet look at the numbers! Incredible. Oh, Box is also listed in fifth place with 25 million users. I'm starting to think that DropBox, RackSpace and Egnyte are in big trouble. Microsoft is on a huge roll, and my gut instinct is that they have some kind of a deal going with Apple iCloud and Office365. Amazon is surprisingly missing.

"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."

Thus spoke the little Dutch Boy, his finger in the dike, his confidence large.  Meanwhile, people with half a brain were heading for the high ground.  California, Texas, Massachusetts and the EU IDABC come to mind.  Hello bob!  Can you say ODEF?

Excellent coverage of a very important interview!

Part of the sad but enduring "History of Failed ODF Interoperability Attempts".  This particular message is dated November 20th, 2006. 

The OpenDocument Foundation was notified a week earlier that the "benefactor" ODF Community group Louis Gutierrez had asked IBM and Oracle to put together in Massachusetts had failed.  This was the group Louis formed around the da Vinci plugin and our InfoSet APi. 

Florian has been hired by Novell, and his first day on the job he finds out about the IBM - Novell deal with Microsoft.  Now he has write the MOOXML plugin for OpenOffice using the MS-CleverAge Translator Project work.  So he writes this message to the ODF TC [office] list. 

The interoperability enhancements Florian suggests are based on the <interoperability eXtensions> submitted in August to the ODF Metadata SC for consideration.

The first element in this list tha tFlorian chose to tackle related to "Lists".  He called it the "LIst Override Proposal".  This became the now infamous "List Enhancement Proposal War" that resulted in Sun having OASIS boot out the Foundation.

Such is life in big vendor ODF'dom

~ge~

Here we go.  The final piece to the MS Stack puzzle falls into place.  Nick Carr provides excellent commentary and analysis.  As usual.

Wow!  Another great quote from Nick.  When we were at the Office 2.0 Conference a few weeks ago, this was the problem every single collaborative computing initiative was facing.  Sure they had great collaborative efforts.  But these efforts were outside exisitng businesss processes and applications!  That's fine for kids and consumers.  But it's the kiss of death for enterprise, smb, and organizations with workgroup busines sprocesses based on MSOffice and Outlook.

So no matter how innovative the WEb 2.0 - Office 2.0 - Enterprise 2.0 applications and services are, they are setting the marketplace for Microsoft to come in and take everything.  Because Microsoft and Microsoft alone ownes the interoperability - integration interfaces into MSOffice and Outlook, they are in a position to destroy any of the 2.0 players at will.  it's simply a matter of entering the space with their own 2.0 application or service.

The more i see of this, the more convinced i am that the governemnts of the world are going to have to step in stop Microsoft's push to move from the desktop into server, device and web systems.

~ge~

Another article from Charles Forelle of WSJ on Microsoft's efforts to corrupt the international standards process

Microsoft Watch Joe Wilcox is on the job.  This particular hgihlighted quote speaks volumes.  The USA anti trust settlement famously allowed Microsoft to commercialize interoperability through expensive licenses -  $8 Million per year for just the basic package.

it looks like the EU would force those interoperability API's out into the open.  I wonder how this position will impact the November 12 th hearing on lifting the USA anti trust oversight?  We have the EU saying the monopolist is illegally maintaining their monopoly through various interop barricades.  And, the USA about to declare that the interop barricades no longer exists, therefore, the monopolist should be free to wreck havoc. 

The stage looks set for a vey dramatic final act.

The title here has nothing to do with the content.  The original title is, "Politics is only a small part of this story". 

it's been a while since i last posted to the ZDNet TalkBack, and was totally thrown by the TalkBack formating needs.  My first post dropped all line breaks, and came out as one long run on sentence.

Now maybe that's the way i write, (and think), but at least with some formatting i can hide that fact!

Still, "Butcher This!" is not a bad title. 

~ge~

The List Proposal donnybrook refuses to go away. In a recent argument concerning Rick Jellife's controversial post, "Harmonization by augmenting ODF with OOXML elements", ODF defender Bruce D'Arcus pointed to his own OASIS ODF TC message thread in an effort to defend Sun.

The issue is that Rick Jellife and others are wondering why it is that Sun opposes interoperability enhancements to ODF that would solve the problem of converting MS binary and XML documents to ODF, and back.

Bruce's reference introduces the incredibly acrimonious "List Proposal Vote Deadline" thread. He also brings up a really important problem. The ODF Charter does not reference compatibility with existing file formats as a key objective.

The consequences of this neglect in the ODF Charter is that every time the issue of compatibility with existing MS binary or xml documents comes up, Sun claims it's, "Outside the Charter and Out of Scope".

I've been hearing that excuse for the last five years!! Meanwhile, the world has discovered it's impossible to implement ODF without also having to totally rip out and replace MSOffice. And that means a costly re engineering all existing business processes, line of business integrated apps, and assistive technology add-ons.

ODF failed in Massachusetts because Sun and OASIS TC refused to recognize the importance of an ODF plugin for MSOffice offering the same high fidelity "round trip" conversion as the OOXML plugin for MSOffice.

For one reason or another, big ODF vendors are locked into a "rip out and replace - legislative mandate" strategy. A strategy to limit the interoperability of ODF with MS documents, applications, and processes has only one consequence. As Massachusetts proved to the world, ODF is impossible to implement if you have workgroups and business processes based

Good commentary from Frank Hayes of Computerworld concerning a very serious problem. Even if ISO somehow manages to approve MS-OOXML, Microsoft has reserved the right to implement whatever extension of Ecma-OOXML they feel like implementing. The whole purpose of this standardization exercise was to bring interoperability, document exchange and long term archive capability to digital information by separating the file formats from the traditions of application, platform and vendor dependence.

If Microsoft is determined to produce a variation of OOXML that meets the needs of their proprietary application-platform stack, including proprietary bindings and dependencies, any illusions we might have about open standards and interoeprability will be shattered.  By 2008, Microsoft is expected to have over a billion MS-OOXML ready systems intertwined with their proprietary MS Stack of desktop, server, device and web applications. 

How are we to interoperate/integrate non Microsoft applications and services into that MS Stack if the portable document/data/media transport is off limits?  If you thought the MS Desktop monopoly posed an impossible barrier, wait until the world gets a load of the MS Stack!

Good article Frank.

~ge~

My response to Tiffany's eWEEK article, Office file formats fail to communicate, and the GCN article, Can't we just get along?. good articles both.
My comments are the first time i've responded directly to Sun's proprietary eXtensions allegation. The truth is that we refused to release the da Vinci plug-in with the must have iX "interoperability enhancements". Sun of course totally opposed our iX proposals, insuring that ODF would fail in Massachusetts, California, Denmark, Belgium and with the EU-IDABC.
Nice work Sun! Yeah, that's the ticket. Limit ODF's interoperability so much so that it is impossible to implement ODF, and the world willl beat a path to your door.
Right!
~ge~ ~ge~

unfortunately the MS argument that support for OOXML equals "conformance" is also the same argument used by OpenDocument supporters to prove multi vendor, multi platform, multi application support.

Check out the comments below this article.  There are links to Ian Foster of Globus and to the Marbux license disseration posted with the OpenDocument Foundation's NO VOTE at OASIS.

This is a screen shot of the new business process interface for MSOffice 2007. Writing add-ons, scripts, and line of business integration apps was never so easy. This is also how Smart Document based metadate, data binding, services binding, and workflow binding can quickly be added to any document object. Very cool. The ODF alternative to the highly proprietary Smart Documents functionality is the open XForms implementation model and, the new Metadata RDF/XML RDFa enhancements. True to form, ODF has chosen to reuse existing W3C standards. Smart Documents is proprietary, and it is set to be a Lotus Notes "intelligent document" killer. it's also the way Microsoft will slam the door on Google search. The Smart Documents metadata model will provide Microsoft network share croppers with the kind of search, re-use and re-purpose tools Googlers only dream about.

The battle to break ODF away from being limited to only those features supported by Sun's OpenOffice/StarOffice continues.  This eMail thread sets the stage for the upcoming presentation of the metadata proposal to the ODF mainline TC.

SEction 1.4.3 of the metadata proposal is a list of existign ODF elements that developers can apply RDF to.  And the reason given fo rwhy the list is so constrained?  Svante Schubert, co-editor and Sun employee has claimed on more than a few occassions that the reason for limiting the lis tis that Sun will only support RDF on those particular ODF elements in OpenOffice/StarOffice.  Therefore, everyone is similarly limited!

I kid you not. 
~ge~