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Some people, bless their hearts, think that what determines which technology is bought and deployed in business and government depends on technical quality. You might call it the "let the best program win" crew.

Some people know better.

Some of us know that technology purchasing has a lot more to do with office politics, old boy networks and friends of friends. Sometimes, those battles get ugly enough that they force out good people. These are frequently people whose only sin was to want to do the right thing of buying the best technology for the best price.

Welcome to the story of Peter Quinn, the soon-to-be former CIO of Massachusetts.

His mistake? He stood up for ODF (OpenDocument Format), an open standard for office documents, and decided that Massachusetts would adopt ODF for use by the Commonwealth's executive agencies.

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Microsoft doesn't believe in competition. Microsoft believes in winning. Period.

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Originally posted by Gir Draxon:
Is the ODF format really superior technically, or is that another subjective judgement?

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Originally posted by Cougyr:

I don't think that's the point. With ODF various departments, and the public, can use different clients that all "talk" to each other, without proprietary interference.

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Abiword and OpenOffice both support DOC format. And for read-only documents, there is PDF.

If every software vendor is using the same file format, and has complete access to the code used to create the format then it doesn't matter what programme you use to create a document. You can open and read a document using any office suite.

It's true that Open Office, Star Office, Abiword, Corel Wordperfect etc. can all read and create M$ formatted documents, they can't do it 100%...its maybe 90% or 85% or whatever. Its not quite perfect and there are little glitches here and there. That's because they're reverse engineering the formats...an incredibly difficult job.

A government shouldn't be favouring one vendor over another. With M$ formats, that's what you're doing.

The second issue is that a government wants to be able to open electronic documents not just today or tomorrow, but 50 years from now. And with proprietary document formats constantly changing you don't want to be a) stuck with electronic documents that you can't open and b) be dependent on a particular software vendor.

M$ was asked to be part of the original group that created the ODF standard, but pulled out and is refusing to support it in future versions of M$ Office. They allege that they "can't" support it for technical reasons. But saying that the world's largest software company "can't" support a file format is such obvious B.S.

M$ wants its Office 12 XML formats considered "open" but its a format that hasn't even been created yet.