[CS-FSLUG] NI: KICKING THE MICROSOFT OFFICE HABIT

[Fred A. Miller]

I don't think I sent this one before.....if I did, enjoy it again. ;)

Fred

KICKING THE MICROSOFT OFFICE HABIT


By Neil McAllister

Posted September 12, 4:00 a.m. Pacific Time

Face it: You're addicted and you can't quit.

When we talk about the Microsoft monopoly, we usually mean Windows. Yet
the Office productivity suite enjoys such total market dominance,
analysts occasionally ponder whether there are even customers left for
Microsoft to win. Mac or PC, you've gotta have it. It's so ubiquitous
that whenever an organization of significant size threatens to give it
up cold turkey, even Linux users take the news with a grain of salt.

Truly, the world is addicted to Microsoft Office. But beginning January
2007, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts  plans to kick the habit. That's
the deadline after which all documents used by Massachusetts state
government agencies must be stored in open formats, according to broad
technology plans issued by the Commonwealth earlier this month.
Currently, approved formats include PDF and OpenDocument, a free,
XML-based office document standard used by several alternative office
suites.

The move comes in response to long-standing criticism of the native
Office file formats. Through the years, Microsoft has repeatedly
manipulated the way Office saves documents, making sure customers always
need the latest version of the suite to stay compatible. Microsoft
argues that it has to do this to add new features, and there's some
truth in that; the Office formats were poorly conceived to begin with.
But if that's the case, why not start from scratch with a more flexible
design?

The answer, of course, is that .doc, .xls, and .ppt are the nicotine that
keeps customers coming back to Office, even when competing apps could do
the job for less. In the same way that online banking sites built with
nonstandard code are enough to keep Web surfers on Internet Explorer,
business users won't waver from Office if there's the slightest chance
their documents could be garbled.

These practices may keep Microsoft's business customers coming back for
more, but to Eric Kriss, secretary of administration and finance of the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, that's the wrong kind of brand loyalty.
If compatibility with Microsoft's proprietary formats is truly that
fragile and tenuous a thing then what, he asks, does that say about the
prospects of long-term archiving of public documents created with
Office? Will those documents still be legible 10 years from now, or 50?

"In the IT business, a long period of time is about 18 months," Kriss
told the Massachusetts Software Council in January. "In government it's
over 300 years, so we have a slightly different perspective."

Microsoft naturally wasted no time in criticizing the commonwealth's
plans, calling them shortsighted and condemning OpenDocument as an
inferior file format. Why all the fuss? Even if OpenDocument pales in
comparison with the native Office formats, surely it isn't inferior to
HTML, RTF (Rich Text Format), and plain old ASCII text as well? Office
supports all of those today. Would it be so hard to support OpenDocument
tomorrow? After all, it's a free standard.

But that's just it. An open document standard won't help Microsoft lock
in its loyal addicts -- excuse me, customers -- so an open standard
isn't in Microsoft's business interests. Microsoft refuses to support
OpenDocument; it doesn't get more bald-faced than that.

Massachusetts is lucky. It has a mandate from the public and enough
influence to make itself heard in Redmond. Short of an intervention,
however, weaning your own company away from unstable, proprietary
document formats might not be so easy.

The first step is to admit that you have a problem.

Neil McAllister is a senior editor at InfoWorld.

-- 
Planet Earth - a subsidiary of Microsoft. We have no bugs in 
our software, Never! We do have undocumented added 
features, that you will find amusing, at no added cost 
to you, at this time.