Showing headlines posted by Andy_Updegrove

A story at InformationWeek called Five Disruptive Technologies to Watch in 2007 couldn't help but catch my eye on New Years Day. The reason is that all five technologies, and the strategies of the vendors that are promoting them, rely upon standards – in most cases, fundamentally. That's no surprise, because disruption by definition is painful, and no one in the supply chain (including end users) likes pain. Providing a convincing argument why the resulting pleasure will more than offset the pain is therefore imperative.

A year ago, many words were written (including by me) on why Microsoft may have chosen Ecma to package Microsoft's Office Open XML formats as a standard. Now that Ecma has finished that project and adopted the result, there's additional data to examine that sheds some light on that question. That will be my topic today, and for the next several entries.

Elizabeth Montalbano at ComputerWorld wrote a piece yesterday about a thus far little noticed project puckishly named "Project Missouri." How little noticed? I just tried a Google search of "'project Missouri' IBM ODF" and found…just Elizabeth's article.

The news on the ODF front continues to flow, as the air wars continue between ODF and OOXML. This morning's email includes a message from OpenOffice.org's Louis Suarez-Potts to those interested in the progress of OOo's ODF compliant, open source software suite. That message announces the third OOo release of 2006, versioned as OpenOffice.org 2.1.

Today is the day that Ecma, the European-based standards body chosen by Microsoft to fast-track its Office Open XML standard to ISO, will vote to approve that specification. What exactly will that mean? Let's try the Q&A format again to sort it all out.

David Berlind posted an interesting interview yesterday with Justin Steinman, Novell's director of marketing. In that exchange, Steinman doesn't show any cards regarding Microsoft's plans, but he does confirm that the conversion code that Novell is developing to make its office suite "bi-directional" will be "100% open source."

Things are changing very fast in the ODF landscape right now: Last week, Corel announced it would provide limited support by mid-2007 for ODF (open, view and edit of text only – but not save), and greater support for OOXML – presentations and spreadsheets as well as text.  Yesterday, Carol Sliwa at ComputerWorld released a detailed story on Microsoft's anti-ODF lobbying in Massachusetts.  Later this week, Ecma will formally vote to adopt OOXML and submit it to ISO for consideration (expect things to pick up on a number of fronts when that happens).  And now we have the Novell announcement. What, as they say, does it all mean?

Carol Sliwa at ComputerWorld has posted an excellent story today on ODF in Massachusetts, based on over 300 emails secured under the Massachusetts Public Records Law (the local analogue of the Federal Freedom of Information Act). The sotry focuses on Microsoft's lobbying efforts in Massachusetts, and confirms, as I reported last week, that Microsoft lobbyist Brian Burke was spearheading an effort to bring pressure on the state's Information Technology Division (ITD) by promoting an amendment that would have taken away much of the ITD's power to make technology policy.

In an announcement that many would have expected to have been made over a year ago, Corel announced this morning that it will provide "open, view and edit support for ODF" - and for Office OpenXML (OOXML), the format submitted to Ecma for adoption, as well. The announcement states that the new functionality will be just a "first step towards a comprehensive set of functionality for both formats," but does not specify what actions might follow, or when.

Massachusetts Governor-elect Deval Patrick last week announced 15 transition team working groups, including one intended to advise the governor on the technology needs of the state government. Seven appointees on this group make sense. And then there's the Microsoft lobbyist that has been working to defeat ODF for the last two years.

The slides are now available for the Chinese standards/open source conference I wrote about on November 8. The most interesting news I learned there was that China has been activelyl developing its own open document specification, which it calls Uniform Office Format. You can now see the full presentation of WU Zhi-gang here.

Last week I wrote about the sorry state of IT funding in Massachusetts, so to even out the picture, I'm writing this time about the happy fact that ODF funding is unaffected, and that I've been told that all is proceeding on schedule. I also have a second reason for spreading the news, which comes from the other side of the globe.

I'm remiss in blogging on the transition in Massachusetts as Louis Gutierrez leaves his position as State CIO (Gutierrez announced that he would resign a month ago), and as Mitt Romney wraps up his single term as governor and looks forward, he hopes, to bigger political games than our small state can offer.

Once upon a time, there was something new called "the Internet," and it was an unknown quantity. While some guessed what it could become, most did not. Famously, Mark Andreessen - of Mosaic, and later Netscape fame - and Tim Berners-Lee did, while Bill Gates did not. Less publicly, those that helped to create something that came to be called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers - or ICANN - did, and the standards analogue of Bill Gates - the International Telecommunications Union - or ITU - did not.

For over a year, ODF has been duking it out with Microsoft's OpenOfficeXML. Now there's a new kid on the block from China: the Uniform Open Format, with GUI, format and API specifications for work processing, spreadsheet and presentation modules, and plans for "related standards, such as physical storage format, application integration, etc."

For more than 200 years, moderns have sought to divine the life stories of the ancients through the practice of archaeology. Through such efforts, we can learn something about the everyday existence of not only those prehistorians that left no written descriptions of their daily lives at all, but also of our more recent forebears, who rarely saw fit to tell us what they ate for breakfast or which penny dreadfuls and broadsheets they liked to read.

Oracle's announcement yesterday of its "Unbreakable Linux 2.0" program, aimed squarely at Red Hat, understandably overshadowed another announcement Larry Ellison made in the same speech. That announcement revealed that Oracle has joined the Free Standards Group (FSG), at the highest level of membership. despite being active in Linux for many years, Oracle had not previously been a member of the FSG at any level.

Chances are you haven't heard a lot about the Unicode, or those that created it, and that's a shame. Unicode 5.0 has just been released, and believe it or not, it's a fascinating read.

The final version of the Office Open XML 1.0 draft was posted an hour or so ago at the Ecma site. It is this specification that Microsoft hopes will be adopted, not only by Ecma, but by global standards body ISO/IEC as well, in an effort to slow the adoption of OpenDocument Format (ODF) by government users, among others.

According to a short "Tech Informer" article just posted at CIO.com, Ecma, the European IT standards organization on Monday may post "as early as Monday," the final approval draft of OpenXML, the document format specification contributed to Ecma by Microsoft in an effort to counter the momentum behind the OASIS and ISO adopted ODF.