Insightful interview over at ComputerWorld between journalist Carol Sliwa and former Massachusetts CIO Louis Gutierrez: “Q&A: Former Mass. CIO feels ‘bittersweet pride’ after battles with Microsoft, legislature: Gutierrez says he would make same choices again that he did in ODF and IT funding fights.”
Note that Gutierrez was the second appointed CIO in the ODF battle in ODF, Peter Quinn was the first. It’s important to read this to see how the battle with Microsoft continued into Gutierrez’ tenure versus seeing it as just something that started with Peter Quinn. In particular, read the first two questions and answers.
Microsoft Word (and Lotus WordPro, for that matter) had as their original design point 25 years or so ago ‘be a WYSIWYG word-processor usable productively by people, and specifically by people needing certain kinds of adaptive technology to overcome certain kinds of disability’.
Then, federal government money was available for public bodies to purchase them.
Unfortunately, there was no federal money requirement for ‘interoperability between competing products’, and so ‘interoperability’ was not delivered.
The federal money was taken by Microsoft and Lotus, and now it’s dried up.
ISO 26300 is all about ‘interoperability’. I use my word processor, you use yours, and we can exchange documents, understand each other, and collaborate.
The proposition that there’s a no-charge implementation available here http://www.openoffice.org/ is as much a puzzle to IBM as it is to Microsoft. But it’s not going away, however much the profit-seeking corporations might want it to go away. We just have to live with it.
It feels like MA were saying ‘Design and deliver us a workflow/document management system, so that the documents in archive are in ODF, and the interaction with the MA citizens is in ODF; we will test it with OpenOffice. We have a bucket of money to pay for this system; vendors, bid for the money.’
I don’t think they intend to leave the Americans-with-Disabilities out in the cold; it’s just that getting that one right is an extra, not a core requirement.
New millennium, new requirements.