In early August I stated in this blog that after the OOXML JTC1 ballot closed on September 2, the sun would rise, the birds would sing, and so on. As we are now at the end of the month and about to move into October, I can state that those things all happened. Indeed, from my perspective, September was a very good month, maybe a historic month, for open standards and open source.
We even had beautiful weather in upstate New York this month. I hope it was good for you as well.
Starting with the defeat of OOXML in the JTC1 ballot, which I would term devastating, and continuing on to the release of OpenOffice.org 2.3 and IBM joining OpenOffice.org, which I would term thrilling, it was an exciting month that gives, I hope, a glimpse of the future. I was not there, but I hear that the OpenOffice.org conference in Barcelona was very productive and extremely positive.
While I know that there are still procedures (often ambiguous) to be followed and code to be written, I want to make the following assertions:
- Single vendor-dictated product specifications proposed as international standards are not acceptable. If not dead, they are dying.
- The need for a single open document standard is more clear now, and ODF is healthy, evolving, and will garner greater and greater participation and adoption.
- Convergence of technologies into standards happens at different times. The best and most optimal time to do this is in the initial standards collaboration and creation process rather than post facto because a given market leader refuses to cooperate and “play nicely” with others. While I appreciate the argument about standardizing too early, I don’t think anyone can claim that the office suite market and technology is immature and not yet understood. No one is creating new, bleeding-edge kinds of paragraphs, as far as I can tell.
- There will still be a market for office applications like word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation programs, but the price point will be much lower, probably less that $100. Indeed, the excellent Apple iWork ‘08 suite is $79 with the family edition for up to 5 installations selling for $99. The Lotus Symphony offering, still in beta, is free. OpenOffice.org and KOffice are open source and therefore free.
- This lower price point will affect development investments and cause the majority of office suites to include open source code. This is true today, but not if you measure by market share.
- “Upsell” ability and upward compatibility from open source applications to commercial offerings will be based on open standards. That is, you might be willing to pay for a commercial implementation if you know you can use exactly the same data as you do with an open source application. Similarly, you will want to use standardized, non-proprietary application programming interfaces.
- Reform of the international standards process is necessary. The Fast Track procedure is deeply flawed and needs to be either significantly modified, or scrapped entirely and reinvented, or abandoned as a poor idea.
I like to say that every day, every week, every month, the world gets more open. In September this was measurably true.
Thanks for putting so much energy into this. Bob Weir seems to have gotten a good summary of the OOo conference, and on the face of it, people are still exploring what happened back in September (post mortem). Here is the latest: http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=1806484531&rid=-219
Microsoft are creating new, bleeding edge, items. Fonts, Clip-Art, and Borders.
Well, they’re not bleeding-edge; but they’re unlikely to be licensable separately from Microsoft Windows and/or Microsoft Office. They are bundled, and if you use them in your document then you will be requiring the recipient to purchase the relevant Microsoft product.
Also, there’s another business model; Sun StarOffice costs $70 from Sun or $0 from Google. The Google one has a Google search bar; presumably there’s value to Google every time someone searches for something using the Google service. Google sell ‘advertising’ and ‘business information’, I believe ?
We think we are going to have trouble flipping the schools from single-vendor Microsoft formats to collaboratively-developed open (ISO 26300) formats. Some of this is related to the deep discount that Microsoft give to the schools; some is related to the proposition that schools’ purchasing frameworks are focused on acquiring permission to use commercial software; some is related to the proposition that most businesses providing on-the-ground support services to schools are Microsoft business partners and derive significant revenue from their Microsoft relationships.
Schools are commercially of little interest; they have little investment money by comparison with businesses and governments. However, my children learn in school, and I would like them to learn open standards. As well as the Microsoft pretty-pretty, and traditional pencil-and-paper methods.
What to do ?
The one thing I’d like IBM to do is realize that most people already have thirty or more usernames and passwords they cannot remember. Removing that obstacle (asking people to create a new account) might be helpful in spreading Symphony to more users.
Since adoption of the proprietary 2007 product has been slow, this is a perfect time to get the product into as many hands as possible in the hope that most users will be satisfied and realize they do not need the OOXML-using suite.
Nah. Soccer mobs riot in pubs after matches. News at 11.
ODF and OOXML are dodo standards: a post mortem cure of the disease. The world is moving away from the page standards and spreadsheet standards. The emerging reality is more like what is found on those big honkin’ server farm applications, or level 3 platforms as pmarca calls them. What will be the role of IBM in a web dominated by two or three BigFarmCo-ops?
The character test: If open source, open unencumbered standards are good for the dodos, are they good for VR worlds (also bigFarmCo-ops today but maybe not tomorrow)? OR will IBM bash the open ISO standards, insist that new standards are needed and back the play for propriety by other sources that believe they can capture the web flag through this door?
The Vision Test (how good an analyst are you): Will an AT&T or cable vendor hosted private VR world that combines the service pipes to a family finally give true meaning to the term “home page” as people discover as you did that they would rather control what is built in the next lot?
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/IBM-Lotus-Symphony/6901c23372a5c90417ad24388e333e0a53b4e71aec30 may help. Don’t tell Sam P I pointed you at it. He won’t get annoyed with you; I’ll have to take my chances whether he gets annoyed with me.
Mind you, quite how you tell that that BitTorrent download will get you the same file as is on the http://symphony.lotus.com/ web site (without downloading it from IBM), I’m not sure.
This is like selling Websphere umbrellas and MQSeries T-shirts.
Adoption of IBM’s proprietary 2007 product (Lotus Notes http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/notesanddomino/ ) is going ahead just fine.
It does appear that Microsoft’s newest ‘office’ franchise is dying from a thousand cuts. Bob, Chris, Rob, et al., you have no idea how deeply grateful we are to each of you at IBM for your sustained commitment to ODF. Now you’re ready to put IBM’s full muscle and brains into OpenOffice development. I’ve been delighted by Symphony for the past week; that’s software to look forward to.
We’re well into the 21st century: it’s time we moved beyond single-vendor dependence, whomever it is. September has indeed been sweet.
Im sorry but even in this month full of good news, the Microsoft loss in europe is HUGE and has to be the biggest blow.
What Tridgell, Jeremy Allison and others from Samba and the FSF Europe have done is stuff of legends.
Its unfortunate that people in the millieu itself dont recognize that.
How much did Microsoft pay to get Real, Sun and all the other big names to abandon that case? 3.6 BILLION dollars.
And they couldnt beat 4 simple software developers and one italian lawyer in court.
standing virtually alone against one of largest, most intimidating software companies in the world – and their army of well-trained and highly-paid lawyers. Not because of money, fame or greed but principle.
I understand how journalists couldnt be bothered with such a quaint concept.
I suspected someone else would bring that up … :)
I can certainly imagine AT&T or cable vendor interest in a wall garden VR world or should I say tiered VR world.
Bob, you are still missing various variables in your analyses and also you just confirmed some of my thoughts of IBM’s open source strategy.
Another data point, the market leader’s previous product in its product lines is it’s biggest competitor for its new products in same product line. This will effect both ODF and OOXML.
So why can’t Microsoft simply publish a revision of its specs sufficient to have any ODF document be changed into OOXML and any OOXML document changed to an ODF document? At that point, it’s just all XML, and the two specs are effectively one, and can be approved as one. Although I think that the MS version is a bit more compact, and might therefore wind up being more used, since the OOXML tags generally are less verbose than the ODF ones?
It’s a commercial choice.
Microsoft think a lot of the value in their business comes from not publishing their specs; or, not publishing them in a form that a competitor can use for interoperability.
They’re probably right. But it will drive the business world to ISO26300, and it will drive Microsoft towards the commercial home entertainment market. Anyone for a game of Age-of-Empires on an XBOX360 ?
http://symphony.lotus.com/ is available at no charge, as is http://www.openoffice.org/and the version of StarOffice in http://pack.google.com/ .
IBM Lotus Notes http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/notesanddomino/ is available now, interoperable with all the above (thanks to ISO 26300), and if you pay the IBM price then you will get the IBM warranty. 120 million users, most of them satisfied (we think).
‘Cheap’ will split into ‘Free’ and ‘Expensive’. If you’re locked into Microsoft formats, you will head to the ‘expensive’ end of things. What would it cost you now for spares and service, if you were locked in to a typewriter ? A card punch ? Magnetic core memory ? Videotapes, either the Betamax or VHS variety ?
Haren:
To do that and compete globally given the recent EU decisions brought on by American companies settling disputes in European courts, the vendors will have to use the open standards. Today, businesses setting up in Second Life are forcing their customers to download proprietary media clients to do business with them. This clearly violates the intent of open standards and competition as it shuts the European vendors out of these markets. For example, would you download a proprietary client to do a Google search?
If Google and MS get into the virtual world markets, they will certainly want to avoid the taint of forcing proprietary systems into public systems.
IBM is not a vendor of VR products. They are doing exploratory research to glean ideas for future business opportunities. Otherwise, the worlds they are setting up are as walled off as any MS Office product could possibly do.
The second problem is performance. A BS Contact (Bit Management headquartered in Munich) use can download a much smaller client and navigate easily and smoothly through a complex world. It is based on the ISO standards for 3D. By contrast, a Second Life client is much larger, slower and hard to navigate. Content developed for it is in a proprietary box with no interoperability or data portability. The content is short lifecycle and the IP for the player is reserved to Linden Labs. As with claims made against Microsoft in the OOXML vs ODF battle, it makes no difference if the content IP is owned by the author if there is no means for it to work with other players.
Contrast that with the X3D marketplace based on the ISO standards. There are five major vendors, two are open source, one has clear performance advantages but all can work with the content developed. Each has focused on some part of the 3D market but all can share assets. There are other companies such as Sense 8 that are producing the haptic systems based on the ISO standard. This is a fully open, standards based and quickly growing market ecology.
Again, I suppose we have to wait and see if IBM’s protests against Microsoft in the ODF/OOXML market reflect ethical concerns or simply economic agendas. The test is in virtual world/real-time 3D technologies where there are existing standards and performant products.
I think it’s an economic agenda.
IBM’s on a roll.
In the old days, there were typewriters and card punches. Nobody makes those now, nowhere on the planet.
In more recent history, there were Internet links, hard disks, personal computers, OS/2, Edmark Software, and Lotus SmartSuite. Other businesses sell them nowadays, but the selling price has fallen through the floor. There’s rather a lot of competition.
For these kind of things, as far as IBM is concerned, cheaper is better. IBM’s likely to be on the ‘buying’ side rather on the ’selling’ side of the equation.
Right now, IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Websphere Application Server are the things that the ‘first-class’ businessman will pay premium prices for. Also, supercomputer chips for all the top-of-the-line games consoles.
That’s what IBM is selling.
High-growth, high-margin businesses.
Flying.
IBM is on record saying it will be working to create standards. Then they spend all their money and time in SL. The American-centrism of that is too obvious to dispute. If they are high, they aren’t looking around much.
The buying and selling side will require the same kind of understanding of the legal conditions in the countries where IBM is buying and selling. Then there are the quality issues.
In the real-time 3D market of which VR is a subset, the Europeans are trumping the Americans in quality although they tend not to be open source. The Silicon Valley companies look miserable when compared to what the Europeans have produced. America turned its back on VRML and that was a mistake of collossal proportions to their ability to produce standards conformant browsers. The European markets are thriving.
In order, here are some products and vendors to look at:
1. Bit Management BS Contact (by a mile). They have the best X3D browser bar none and long experience with building VR world support systems. They are also the vendor being adopted into the Homeland Security training systems (See Metropolitan Transit Authority – NY). They are adding product lines and also working to improve their standards-based VR world interoperability. Pricey but worth it.
2. ParallelGraphics Cortona. They are one of the only early VRML startups to still be vending. They have concentrated on technical information systems (think 3D technical manuals) in the last few years. Their editors and viewers are in use in industry and defense.
3. Fraunhoeffer. Simply amazing. I haven’t tested against this browser but the reports on the progress made in items like stereoscopic viewing are incredible.
4. Octaga. They are a Norwegian company doing industrial applications. They are fairly new but have made fast moves to get into oil and gas applications.
5. Media Machines. They just received $9.4 million in VC capital. Their Flux Viewer is somewhat anemic if the worlds are complex, but they have one of the best 3D editors and are moving on with the Network Sensor standard for interoperable VR worlds. With the infusion of capital they will grow fast. They are a West Coast company.
See Sense 8 for the haptic stuff, or go to http://www.web3d.org for the latest news on the projects and vendors. The work going on in the universities in the US (the unis didn’t ignore X3D) and Europe is outstanding.
I am not suggesting open standards are bad. Going gobal with a wall garden is sleep walking into anti-trust.
AT&T and cable vendors have commerical interest in creating a tiered internet, see Net Neutrality debates.
Economic incentives seem to prompt walling off, probably for short-term results though not always rational long term.
We can always analyse IBM using Game Theory[1] as well.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Theory
len, IBM is not spending all its time and resources on SL, as the folks in the emerging business group take great pains to say. Do did I, at the IW500 conference last week. The company is looking at the space very broadly.
That’s good news. I’ll try to find some of there comments. I don’t see any of that in the articles on the web. It is all SL-related, but maybe I am not looking at the right articles. Do you have any pointers?
I noticed you were speaking but didn’t see a video of your speech. Is one available?
Let me know what you work out. There is a Siggraph video at the web3D.org page which is good overview of what some of the companies are doing in that standards market.
I did get the fielding bugs out of ROL. As a shake test, it has worked pretty well. The PG people sent me changes to the VRML big list so it would load better in their browser. Unfortunately, with all of the events I am passing in the main world between the different world components, and the script that is switching for type compatibility, the BS Contact browser is still the one that runs it completely and smoothly. Holger and crew have had fifteen years to work on their culling and other optimizations and that is reflected in the world load time. That is a typical trade-off: fast load vs fast navigation. Although in the case of ROL, the sound files are orders of magnitude larger than the wrl files and textures combined. That was the point of ROL: to build a 3D album that mixes itself in real time using combinations of timers and other events to ramp sound up and down, sequence it, etc.
The area that is heating up fast is drag and drop building. I don’t expect any business type to go through the kinds of things I do to build worlds given I rely so heavily on manual editing.
@Haran:
That is right in general, but the issues are complex. For standard standalone worlds running on the local machine, the standards are very strong at ISO. For building server-side integrated worlds, they are nascent and that is the area of churn. The gardens are walled because the server farms are walled. That is where we have to be careful that the customers understand that integration of real-time services (audio, wrapped video, and the illusion of simultaneous changes in a 3D rendering) require some form of centralized distribution right now. Except for Croquet, no one really has a good peer-to-peer approach.
So suppose you have an AT&T integrated account (phone, cable, internet), the AT&T servers would host all of the infrastructure you need. You might want to think of this as you think of your cellphone service. If you change providers, can you take your phone number with you? Now scale that out to include your crafted home world and avatars. Your avatar represents your identity and might act as the impersonate() function does in SQL Server. Can you move it to a different provider and reassert the relationship between it and the operations/services you have purchased? Can you move your crafted home world?
Without strong standards for each of these, it will never work within any kind of realistic costs. That is why the hosted business systems are gaining in popularity, but that is a transitional effect. Many businesses will want to host their own and can. Home buyers will want transportable services. The question is how to bridge the chasm between the big server farm systems and the locally hosted or ISP hosted systems?
There is an incredible amount of work to do here and it won’t be done by one company or likely one consortium. The Web3D Consortium has a liaison with with the W3C and the Open Geospatial Consortiums plus ISO. They are in a good position to go forward with their current initiatives. But to get to the next plateau, a lot of different businesses and business markets will have to come together to establish open standards for multiple services. Real-time 3D is a vital part but only one part of that.
Certainly there are opportunities to build walled gardens along the line of SL and WoW, but I don’t believe this will go that way for all of the reasons mentioned. There are too many different interests, too many different jurisdictions, and really, no one company can bring this market to full emergence. The hard problem will be to get contributors to accept the necessity of open standards and participation agreements that limit IP encumbrances ideally to none. So far, that is the stumbling block for many. When I served with the W3DC BoD, it was a very real problem for at least two large vendors that now wants to reestablish themselves as players in this market. What remains to be seen is if the current events in the EU and elsewhere have caused such to take another look at what they need to do to grow the market. Short term interests or no, what the web has certainly proved is the way to grow a market is to open it to competition based on the open standards, not to close it and attempt to dominate it with proprietary systems. This is where I am in full agreement with IBM’s positions.
len: I don’t believe that the panel I was on was on the web, though the earlier one at MIT was. We had Joe Miller from Linden on that, but he was the only SL rep.
As to mentions of IBM and other worlds, a quick search yields examples such as
“IBM Making Virtual Worlds Accessible to the Blind”
“Multiple worlds collide with IBM presentation”
“IBM To Bridge Realities, Stage Trans World Event Today”
“The IBM Innovate Quick internal metaverse project”
I’ll read those but I’ve seen some of them already. I was checking around and found a lot of references to Sandra Kearney’s appearances but all seem to be SL-focused. If IBM is trying to be a middleman for VR systems emergence, it should spend enough time with the other technologies in prominent mentions where those doing the mentioning are not SL-advocates.
I expect Google and MS entering the market to shake up the perception that Linden Labs is at the center of all things. Remember the early days of SGML when the IBM brand was so tightly linked that we could never get past the perception that it was an IBM product (yes, Doc worked at Almaden). Then with XML, the opponents such as Marc Andreesen went to a lot of trouble wherever there was press to try to link it tightly to Microsoft and claim it was proprietary and closed. Eventually this period passes. Some of the loudly tarted startups vanish and the companies with real products and real business plans survive. (say Altova). The big companies such as Microsoft that committed deep resources eventually raced ahead. On top of those other companies built products to improve even that. (Take a look at Iron Speed Designer layered over ASP.Net 2.0. A RAD That Actually Works.)
This is reminiscent of the early web in ways people who actually weren’t that involved in markup or hypermedia don’t recognize. Berners-Lee et al with the quiet assistance of DARPA and others pushed very good forward looking projects aside to make HTML the Only choice. As a result, hypermedia development languished in terms of real innovation, and then when the innovations did come, they were firmly in the pockets of companies such as Microsoft that hired away the designers and the ideas. XUL and XAML aren’t the first of their species. So if you sense some are fighting for their history and their rights to their work, well, you’d be right. IBM has launched itself into a market where it has no products, no real experience and not much credibility with codeMakers. It has money, business expertise, and a travel budget. These can all work to the mutual advantage but I don’t think it should repeat the mistakes of the early web. That is a bit like trying to have Woodstock 2.0. It doesn’t exactly work the same way twice.
Kearney needs to take the X3D people a bit more seriously. They have something she doesn’t: a real standard, mature, well-developed, open and most importantly, extensible. Linden Labs doesn’t have that. Raph Koster doesn’t have that. IBM doesn’t have that.
So, if what you have said so eloquently and frequently about ODF, open standards and so on is really what you…. YOU… believe and are willing to bet your badge on, then take the X3D people seriously and figure out how to be an honest broker among them. You can do that. Then IBM will be making a real contribution and the economic issues will work out just right for your company.