Open Malaysia

When any new threat to a monopolistic situation appears, one can rest assured that the threatened ones will launch a series of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) messages on why they should continue to remain a monopoly. My blogging colleague, Hasan, covered it well when he debunked the dangers of dictating procurement policies.

It does look like the Titch article was the start of it all. Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy in the UK now says, "The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory".

This is FUD, even if it's called by any other name. How really can a document format be slower than another ? Document formats, like the ISO/IEC standard 26300 ODF, are just standards specifying how documents are to be saved and the formatting used for them. Documents, not being executable programs, are not slow or fast. To call them that is just nonsensical, and in the case of Alan Yates, pure FUD.

What really matters are the programs which read those document formats. Now, with an unencumbered[1] document format standard like ODF, there will be many office suites which can read and write ODF, and the performance of these office suites will be determined by the market at large. ODF by itself is certainly not a performance attribute, but rather the mechanism which your information will be carried by.

This does sound like the proponents of OpenXML buying time, since ODF has already been approved as an ISO/IEC standard and OpenXML being only decided on by the ECMA by end 2006. 7 months is a long time in information and communications technology, and these FUD attacks do sound like the cries of a hurt beast. The market will realise that as an approved and truly open standard, ODF should be the one they will be investing and committing in.

[1] I'll cover what I mean by an unencumbered open standard in another blog entry