Letter to the Editor

An interesting article incorporates different views of slightly biased technology professionals. If I could speak on behalf of the IT community, including both business users and decision makers, I would confirm that customers are indeed not looking for more standards, but do look for a single unified platform and a standard that would allow them to retain and reuse the electronic information in years to come. The desire to standardize has absolutely nothing to do with choice, but with the business benefits that could be realized only by interoperability.

Biggest headaches of the IT departments in the 21st century are what software to choose, and for what reason, meaning that there must be a tangible benefit then selecting one platform over the other. The catch is that unfortunately, vast majority of IT managers as well as business decision makers are often lacking the necessary knowledge and do not have access to the information that would support the decision-making process. Hence, they make their choices based on either vendor recommendation, or an advice of often-biased consultants.

Needless to say, that in the past, many organizations went tough a very painful, and ineffective process of converting their data from one format to another just to find that another conversation may be required should they decide to choose yet another software package in a not so distant future. If memory serves me right, in the past, Microsoft pioneered conversion tools that would ensure smooth transition from let’s say WordPerfect to Microsoft Office.

While I have nothing against the Open Document Format, in my view, it has too many functional limitations when it comes to creating content rich, professionally designed documents. In comparison with Microsoft Office 2007, not all the other office suites are up to par if you look at ease of use and interoperability. If you look at document design capabilities, the Open Document Format proponents have a lot to learn. At the end of the day, the features found in Microsoft Office 2007 will appear in IBM and Sun products at the later date, meaning that certain standards set my Microsoft are accepted by the competition.

The same competition must have the guts to admit that Microsoft is on the right track, having invested billions in R&D building standards that are generally accepted by customers around the World. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for the healthy competition, but what ISVs should be concentrating on is not format, but the end-user experience, and feature rich, interoperable office productivity applications. It should become the golden rule of software development. Instead of spending time and money fighting over standards, a universal standard such as Open XML should be adopted to alleviate frustration and uncertainty, and ensure that we, as information technology professionals, do not have to go through a series of painful conversion projects in the future, and that customers can share information across multiple platforms without even thinking of format differences.

Terabytes of documents and limitless electronic content created today are our legacy whether we want it or not. Our children must be able to use the information to gain knowledge and advance. Just imagine what would happen if we could not read the Bible, simply because we are unable to open the file 1000 years from now. I would hate to see our children, and grandchildren sit at their desks trying to figure out how to open a file created 10-15 or even 20 years ago, instead of learning by having seamless access to the information across interoperable, intelligent systems.