[clug] AGIMO seeks comments (again) on productivity software file formats

[Paul Wayper]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On 02/17/2012 12:24 PM, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir wrote:
> Last time on the AGIMO Blog:
> http://www.zdnet.com.au/agimo-faces-down-office-standard-critics-339308747.htm

My comment is: John Sheridan says:

[our job is] "not to choose a more perfect standard and then move 265,000 PCs
to it"

Which really reads:

"Microsoft has achieved vendor lock-in exactly the way you all told us they
would, and now we're going to hand them all the money they want because we're
afraid of the cost of change."

And the problem we have is that we lack a lot of the shiny presentations that
make Microsoft seems so credible, and a lot of the integration that is really
vendor lock-in.  Microsoft sells vendor lock-in as a feature: if you buy our
products, all your stuff will work together.  And that sounds wonderfully
tempting to a CIO who hasn't also been a sysadmin or on desktop support -
because it's about as realistic as "and you can write your documents in
Microsoft Word and then publish them directly as HTML!".

I kind of agree with Bruce Perens here - we need to talk to these people more
- - but it's a terribly difficult job, since the FOSS community doesn't have an
actual hierarchy or public relations bureau and CIOs at the moment don't
understand why a random guy in a business shirt and well-clipped beard is
bothering them about how freedom and zero cost are worth more than an
interoperable straitjacket when they've got a meeting in five minutes with the
head of Microsoft Asia-Pacific.

*sigh*

Have fun,

Paul
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/

iEYEARECAAYFAk8+HZUACgkQu7W0U8VsXYIh1ACbBpNmBliWCI3JEPbiggQm7bKC
w8kAn0YN4A5NrVZE1o1QJ7HgAH8p4UB6
=mKTV
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----