Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric

[Russell McOrmond <russell flora ca>]

On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Andreas J Guelzow wrote:

> I believe many of us have adopted gnumeric because of the added features 
> and correct behaviour/result.  In my personal opinion there is already 
> much to high a value put on interoperability with XL.


  The GNOME team is of course free to make whatever project direction
decisions it wants, but I believe that this direction choice will have
Gnumeric stuck in a niche market that won't enjoy the market share
expansion that other FLOSS tools will.


  Multi-vendor interoperability is what allowed V32 and related standards
based modem technology to quickly eradicate V.fast (Hayes), HST
(USRobotics) or Telebit's Trailblazer technology.  It made modems more
useful for 'the average joe' who just wanted them to work and didn't want
to have to care about brand names.  Multi-vendor standardization is what
gave us both the huge advancements of TCP/IP, HTML, etc.

  I believe that interoperability slowly moves up the stack as a
technology becomes mature.  The time has come for communications and file
format interoperability to exist for basic infrastructure office
productivity tools.  There is plenty of room for innovation in other
aspects of the software.

  I'm not just parroting ideas out of a book, but expressing ideas I had 
before I read Innovators Dilemma.

  I may be entirely wrong, but it is something for this project to 
consider and either accept, reject, or at least sit on the fence with a 
well written interopability plug-in.


  I'll move forward with my promotion of the OASIS open office TC file
format, especially for my primary audience which is government.  My
perception with working with bureaucrats so far is that there is only two
contenders that are being looked at these days:  Microsoft Office and
OASIS compatible.  The main reasons are the same: file compatibility for
inter-office document exchange.  Features of an individual package are
largely seen as irrelevant compared to compatibility on interchange, and
'innovation' in a file format is seen as a liability.

  Microsoft Office compatibility is a moving target, and FLOSS will never
be able to gain adequate market share playing catch-up with a (hostile)
third party.  With the OASIS work, and having a FLOSS tool be the
reference implementation, we have a chance to make a huge change in office
productivity (and thus desktop computing).


  Again, I could be totally wrong -- but it is worth thinking about.  
Maybe save this message and see what things look like 3 years from now ;-)

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
 Any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, 
 VCR's, or personal computers, must be under the control of the citizen 
 and not a third party.   -- http://www.flora.ca/russell/