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As you may recall, the ODF Alliance was formed on March 3, 2006. Given that they've already had, oh, two and a half weeks to change the world, I thought I'd check out the Alliance Website to see whether they had achieved their manifest destiny yet.
All too often, initiatives are launched to much fanfare, and then months go by with no evidence of real progress or expansion in membership. True, any new organization is entitled to a bit of time to find its legs, but quick action is a good sign that the members mean business, and that the structure that they have put together is effective. So let's see how the Alliance measures up.
Happily, the Alliance appears to be doing just fine, thank you, with (among other things) more than three times the number of members it had on its launchdate.
I'm as bad as Mr. Updegrove -- impatient for world domination. We'll have to remember that it's hard to extract a tick after it buries its suckers in you.
Weird, secret, changing file formats have been the way MS has held customers' data hostage and would-be competitors at bay. If the CEO sends out memos in the latest, non-standard, non-compatible format, then everyone else has to have the latest version of the parasite, too. Once the company's documents are safely(?) tucked away in one of these weird formats, it becomes expensive to convert the bulk over to something open, readable, and archive-worthy.
An agreed-upon open standard for documents, along with multiple implementations of the standard by a wide range of vendors, is the best way to break that lock-in. Companies, like individuals, should control their own data. The ODF Alliance seems to be educating people of that fact.
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Weird, secret, changing file formats have been the way MS has held customers' data hostage and would-be competitors at bay. If the CEO sends out memos in the latest, non-standard, non-compatible format, then everyone else has to have the latest version of the parasite, too. Once the company's documents are safely(?) tucked away in one of these weird formats, it becomes expensive to convert the bulk over to something open, readable, and archive-worthy.
An agreed-upon open standard for documents, along with multiple implementations of the standard by a wide range of vendors, is the best way to break that lock-in. Companies, like individuals, should control their own data. The ODF Alliance seems to be educating people of that fact.