Newsforge is running an opinion piece by Ryan Leduc about how to make OpenOffice file formats the de facto standard for document interchange.
This article is classic open source advocacy of the first order. It focuses on the technical obstacles that need to be overcome (but won't); once those issues are resolved, then the goal (widespread adoption of a particular open source package), is a foregone conclusion. Business, social and psychological concerns are irrelevant because, well, we're talking about software, aren't we?
Does anyone remember Bob Metcalfe? Specifically, Metcalfe's law? The reason why Microsoft Office formats are the de facto standard for document interchange is because Microsoft has spent ludicrous amounts of time and money in market engineering (a discipline that's quite different than software engineering, and completely unrelated) to ensure that Office applications and viewers are ubiquitous. The vast majority of users who are online and are likely to exchange documents either (1) have some form of Microsoft office installed, (2) acknowledge a need to obtain a version of Microsoft Office (or Windows+Office, as Microsoft would prefer), (3) use some form of a free-of-charge Office document viewer, or (4) actively ignore Office documents or engineer their workflow to not require Office documents. OpenOffice plugins will not address these issues, but will in fact duplicate or exacerbate these issues, especially in the near term.
Office is the de facto standard because of the actions the author proposes for OpenOffice. It has taken literally a decade to get Office entrenched to the point it is today, and that entrenchment is only deepening. Adopting the same strategy is good in a network with no standardization, but isn't guaranteed to work in a network with a de facto standard. Absent external forces, this strategy is likely to fail the second time around, regardless of any philosophical, religious, or moral benefits come with adopting Open Office or any other free software package.
What I find most striking from this analysis is that it focuses on "document interchange" yet doesn't mention Adobe or PDF at all. Adobe has already done some of the same work that the author proposes "we" do around Open Office. In fact, PDF is a suitable replacement in most situations for sending office-type documents (how often does a recipient need to make edits?), yet it is used far less frequently than Microsoft Office documents for document exchange. In two projects I've worked on this year alone, Office documents were a requirement; and PDF files, although functionally equivalent, failed to meet at least one business need in both cases. These projects are not isolated, and I feel they are indicitive of a great many situations in business today.
