Massachusetts and Microsoft
Tim Bray recently posted an update on the Massachusetts OpenDocument decision, dissecting some leaked talking points from Microsoft. These expand on the one-liner I quoted in my previous post on the subject. This passage gets right to the heart of it:
The notion that using standardized formats and protocols gets in the way of innovation is twenty-year-old thinking, it was wrong then and its wrong now. I remember perfectly well, back in the Eighties, IBM and Wang and Pr1me and DEC explaining why their proprietary networking stacks were much more innovative and better than this new-fangled least-common-denominator Internetworking thing, and why their proprietary operating systems were more innovative than Unix. (Hey, most of those companies are out of business, aren’t they?)
These days, anybody trying to sell a one-vendor proprietary networking stack would be laughed out of the market. I am quite certain that in another decade or two, anyone trying to sell a proprietary office-document format will be too. Massachusetts is smart enough to be a little ahead of the game.
Update: Browsing outward from Tim’s essay I came across a few other interesting pages related to Massachusetts, Microsoft, and OpenDocument: