TooMuchGreen

I wasn’t going to post today but as recent article from Linux Pro furnished us with the quite substantial news that IBM have dumped Microsoft Office in favour of their open solution, Lotus Symphony, I obviously felt obliged. Although an understandable tactic for any company to prefer internal use of their own software product the ramifications of this particular strategy reach much further than some in-house back slapping due to the nature of the file format in use.

Lotus symphony utilises the Open Document Format (ODF), a cross platform open file type already the default standard across an increasingly popular selection of open source office suites. Star Office from Sun, Neo Office for the Mac, Open Office, Corel WordPerfect Office, KOffice and notably – the mighty Google Docs all default to ODF, Microsoft do support ODF however as with most things Microsoft an extra plugin is required. The surprise here is Apple who although fully support ODF for basic text edit do not as yet offer compatibility through their iWork application, this will obviously be seen as vendor lock-in however with ODF presently holding such a miniscule market share it’s no reach to predict support will come soon enough to match demand, especially with base integration already provided.

If you step to one side and view the whole are of digital documentation from a real and unbiased perspective (as you should with anything) it’s blatantly obvious to see why ODF is a much more agreeable solution for all concerned. To have one format owned, developed and produced by a single vendor as the de facto all encompassing global standard does nothing but promote their own software application and tie everyone in to their own preset licensing, a cross platform independent solution is a much more civilised way to do business (unless of course you’re a raging capitalist out for world domination).

A previous post on Too Much Green highlighted the eked out daily push for open source awareness and how gratifying it is when one of the big boys comes on board (i.e Dell and their latest move to Ubuntu 9.04 on selected laptops), from a software aspect IBM’s own move to Symphony is just this, propagation of awareness seems to spread further and easier when it comes from the top.

Go on Big Blue…!