The Massachusetts Office Party

Quattro Vezina writes "The Inquirer reports that the state of Massachusetts has performed a modern-day Boston Tea Party, by dumping Microsoft Office in the proverbial ocean. According to the article, 'every state document must be in PDF or using Open Office formats' starting in 2007." Forbes has the story as well. More from the article: "The switch to open formats such as these was needed to ensure that the state could guarantee that citizens could open and read electronic documents in the future, according to Massachusetts - something that was not possible using closed formats. The proposal, which is open for comment until the end of next week before it takes effect, would represent a big boost for open source software such as Open Office, which is created by volunteer programmers and made available free of charge."

Comments

As a Massachusetts Resident

[rob_squared]

I appreciate this. But its more for their own bottom line than for the tax payers. While both will benefit, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention all the reasons for their choice.

And anyway, why wasn't I invited to this party?

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[MyLongNickName]

The government's bottow line is the same as the tax payer's bottom line. Either through taxes or deficit, every dollar that is spent by big brother comes out of our pocket. Not quite sure of the point of your post, except to jip by out of FP! :)

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[avalys]

Your knee-jerk needs to be reprogrammed. It's still in bitch-about-companies mode.

The government is not a corporation. The government takes your money by force and spends it. Any time they're spending less money, you should be happy, because it's your money they're saving.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[/ASCII]

I think it is surprising how little people care about open formats. For me it is very important to know that I'll be able to open and edit my own documents twenty years from now, and to convert them to whatever format is all the rage then.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[gowen]

Any time they're spending less money, you should be happy, because it's your money they're saving.

That's right. Because we all know that government's never do anything beneficial to the community: like roads, education for those who couldn't otherwise afford it, public transportation, water supplies, defense, the police...

A knee jerk libertarian is a still a jerk.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[kilodelta]

We're slowly moving away from MS apps in RI too. For example, most servers are now LAMP vs. being MS IIS, Exchange, etc. There are still a couple of Novell GroupWise servers but those are slowly being phased out.

For example, my agency has 60 users. For MS Office assuming a government discount that makes the end price $200 we'd be shelling out $12,000.

And lets not forget the obscene pricing of MS software for servers. A 50 user MS-SQL for instance would run you approximately $8K to $10K and that excludes the OS.

LAMP - server cost $5K. Cost of software $0, Cost of configuration time: $1K or so. So for the $20,000 above you could buy three new servers and have them congigured to do what you want them to.

And a desktop can be had for
So yes, it is a bottom line exercise and a clear signal to Microsoft that:

a) We won't pay bloated prices for sofware that we only use a small subset of features on, but isn't crippled from occasionally using the gee-whiz features.

and

b)Constant upgrade cycles in which we shell out full retail for something that is an upgrade.

They had better wake up and smell the coffee. As government goes, so goes business that interacts with government. Microsoft could be staring at a huge defection of customers in the near term.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[shis-ka-bob]

I agree completely. Here is one example. A dissertation is often printed about three times (one for the department, one for the univerisity library and once for the student to keep). If the document is shared, it is shared electronically. What are the odds that you can read an Word 3.0 document compared with the odds that you can read a PDF, LaTeX or even RDF? It blows me away that people will work hard to produce a document that should become part of the corpus of human works, and then save in in a format that will be dead in a few years.

Open formats are the clear answer.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[fitten]

Any time they're spending less money, you should be happy, because it's your money they're saving.

You must be new here...

Whenever they "save" money in one budget, they put that into another budget, they don't give it back. This means that they spend the same amount of money, spending less on one thing and more on something else. If they spent "less" money, then they would be able to lower taxes which means they get less money into the coffers and that is not allowed.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[Boing]

I think it is surprising how little people care about open formats.

How can this be surprising? To 98% of the people in the world, the computer is, and shall remain, a black box. They don't care how it works inside. They don't care about LZW compression, or XML, or TCP/IP, or C++, or the difference between OR and XOR. They don't think of their files as being in a "format" unless poor user interfaces dictate that they must. To them, the file is a photograph they took, or a screenplay they've written, or a song they downloaded, and the internals of its definition are irrelevant.

And to take a small jab at the open source community, this is where we have problems reaching the desktop market. We design interfaces for ourselves, and we care about the internals. We want to know that PNG supports alpha transparency, or that our Windows XP installation is on /dev/hda1 while our Linux swap partition is on /dev/hdb2. We care whether the songs we listen to use VBR to save a few extra kilobytes on a 300 GB hard drive.

But when you provide these things as options to a user who doesn't know or care what they mean, you're asking them to commit to a choice when they don't want to. They'll feel helpless, and stupid, and if/when they complain, we too often reply "well it's not our fault you can't use it. RTFM."

Okay, I kinda veered off topic there... regarding open formats: in the end, there's relatively little difference between an open and a closed format on a twenty-year timeline, from the perspective of the 98% group. Either way, they're not going to be the ones designing the conversion tool. If it's an open format, they have to hope that enough geeky guys with free time find it an interesting or relevant enough problem to solve. If it's a closed format, they have to hope that the company's still in business and updating its tools, or that it released something before it went belly-up, or that it opened its file formats, or that its developers are good samaritans. And here's the kicker: the 98% group does not know which of these alternatives is more likely to be the case. They probably don't realize the problem exists. It's not because they're stupid or willfully ignorant, because once again they only see the computer as a tool. You might as well call them stupid or willfully ignorant for not knowing what machine screws are used to hold their washing machine together.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[Harry Coin]

Have you ever worked in / around the Federal Government? My experience in the USAF was that at the end of every fiscal year, every project went on a ill-advised spending spree to ensure that they spent every penny of their budget (flat screen LCDs, the newest computers, expensive peripherals) all of which was totally unneccessary. Every federal project does this at the end of the fiscal year so that they don't come in under budget, otherwise they'd have their budget cut because the don't need the money. Since money == clout in the government, there is never, ever any "extra money". It's all spent. Every time.

The Federal Government will not spend your money wisely, because it is not their money. End of story.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[gowen]

I didn't say governments are completely and unambiguously great -- just that they're not unambiguously bad. Money spent by government is not necessarily wasted, which is what the original comment implied.

This is not a subtle philosophical point.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[Azarael]

Gov't are pretty good at finding ways to spend money. So when they find one place where they can save money , they will probably find somewhere else to spend those savings. So it's probably more likely that the state and the taxpayers would be getting more bang for their buck than a reduction in spending.

I love it, but...

[AltGrendel]

...how long will it last? Any bets that Microsoft will be there, trying to get this reversed?

So, which will MS Office support?

[TheRaven64]

Currently, Microsoft office can't read or write either of these formats[1]. So which is Microsoft going to add? They could relatively easily add PDF output as an export-only option, similar to the OpenOffice implementation, and treat it like printing. This would potentially have the effect of reducing the number of people using .doc as an interchange format, reducing lock in. The other alternative, supporting OpenOffice formats seems much less likely - if MS Office could read and write these formats it would be a lot easier for people to migrate away from it.

[1] Yes, I know it can with third party products, some of which are Free.

Re:So, which will MS Office support?

[TheRaven64]

Print to PDF is a pretty horrible way of creating PDFs. It strips out anything that can't be displayed on a printer, and often loses a lot more. For example, text is often printed as graphics, so rather than having a copy of the font embedded and pointers to each character, you have a series of bezier curves for each character, making the whole thing bigger. You lose all hyperlink information - no clicking on links in a page of contents and certainly no copy of the table of contents in the bookmarks meta-data section of the PDF.

I haven't used Acrobat either - I usually generate PDFs from LaTeX using pdflatex. I get much smaller PDFs than printing to PDF creates, and using the hyperref package, I get ecternal hyperlinks wherever I create them, internal hyperlinks from the table of contents/figures and index, and a copy of the table of contents in the bookmarks section for quick navigation.

Re:So, which will MS Office support?

[doublem]

They will support the format just enough that they can tick the box on the list of features, but not enough that it will be reliably compatible with any other implementation

What do you think their XML format is all about?

The data is still an obfuscated binary, it's just crammed into pseudo XML to bloat the file a bit more.

They get to check off "XML" support, and yet it's completely useless unless you're using Microsoft development tools for anything outside of Office itself.

Re:So, which will MS Office support?

[DrXym]

I think Microsoft is realising that locking up Office document formats isn't going to work for much longer (see their various efforts to create more "open" XML based formats for MS Office) and are trying to work out what to do instead.

I think much more likely is that eventuallythey might support .odt (etc.) as an import / export format but still default to their own format. They could easily pull a few tricks to make sure that .odt is inferior to their own while they were at it, such as not shipping it in the bundled / home editions of MS Office, or by only supporting certain features, or by generating broken content or content infested with their own proprietary markup.

Re:PDF?

[MBtronics]

Why? Everybody can view a PDF-file, only those who pay for MS-office can read their files (if you have the correct version)!

Guaranteed Availability in the Future?

[sfontain]

I hardly see how Open Office and PDF formats "guarantee" citizens will be able to view electronic documents in the future any more so than MS Office formats. For all anybody knows, in 5 years, all of these formats could be dead as new formats emerge. And guess, what--When that happens, there will be conversion tools for the next mainstream formats, too.

Why doesn't microsoft offer the option...

[ChrisF79]

I understand that Microsoft wants to keep the files that Office creates in a closed format. But, in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening, why not offer an open format as an option in the "Save As" dialog box? That way, users such as the Massachusetts government could be satisfied and still use Office, and everyone else could continue using the closed format. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I really think 99% of the users would still just click the save button as usual, because I doubt the average Office user is aware or even cares that they are not saving in an open format.

Re:Why doesn't microsoft offer the option...

[Wile_E_Peyote]

If Office opened and saved OO.o documents, there would be a flood of people migrating away from it.

I think you over stated that. You can already share documents between Word and OO; also many companies have processes and custom bits of code that only run on Office right now and they have a comfort level with the suite and Microsoft.

I know how they feel

[bgfay]

For years I used WordPerfect and liked it a whole lot. However, I didn't like the price of it, the upgrades (I know, I didn't HAVE to upgrade), and the fact that the Linux version sucked while the Mac version was discontinued. So I switched to OpenOffice.

Only when 2.0 comes out will I have easy access to all those WP documents.

I use OpenOffice for a lot of reasons, one of which is that I think I have a good chance of being able to open my documents for a long time.

That said, I think that this is all a PR thing to get MS to lower their price. I don't believe that a government bureaucracy will make this step for real. Next thing you'll tell me that they've decided to run Linux.

There needs to be a new name for this sort of thing where groups say "I'm switching!" in order to get the real price from MS. Let's call it the Boy Who Cried Linux or BWCL for short.

Re:PDFs?

[TheRaven64]

Well, the format specification is here. If you don't like their implementation then write your own. There are no license constraints on the format - you are free to do whatever you want with the specification.

Re:PDFs?

[davandhol]

What version have you been using? Adobe 7 is very quick (even the professional version) in opening up PDFs. Heck, I don't even notice sometimes that my PDF is already open, it's so fast. Even with 6, you could move the plugins to a different folder so that Adobe wouldn't load them all up at the same time.

Did I miss your point? I don't know how else you could mean what you said.

Re:PDF?

[hattig]

Quite possibly the government doesn't want you editing their stuff!

PDF is really quick for me however. Then again, I'm on a Mac. I don't have Office, and therefore Word would be an absolutely terrible choice for me.

Notice how PDF is a minor irritant for you but will still work, whereas .doc stops me viewing it?

offset costs

[jrm228]

I hope they do some actualized ROI analysis. It'd be really interesting to find out what percentage of the money they save in software licensing is offset by the paid-time of implementation, user training, and dealing with interoperability issues with other organizations/individuals/citizens.

I paid a lot less taxes in NH than I do in MA, and despite this development, I'm not optimistic that it will result in any significant changes from my perspective.

Microsoft's Engineered incompatibility

[Tontoman]

It seems amazing that a government entity hasn't done this long ago.

MS Office formats are incompatible even between different versions of MS Office. The Microsoft competitive model is to lock out competition using undocumented binary file formats.

In the past, they gain a foothold with one or two in an organization using a "new" Office format, and this forces dozens of upgrades. And also ensures that competitor's compatibility features can't keep up with Microsoft.

These same anti-competitive tactics also make it difficult for different government agencies to communicate. Or even read their own archived documents.

The libre is more important than the gratis

[stlhawkeye]

The proposal, which is open for comment until the end of next week before it takes effect, would represent a big boost for open source software such as Open Office, which is created by volunteer programmers and made available free of charge.

This is nice for our bottom line, since all of the money our government pisses away is OUR money. However, I'd be willing to pay EVEN MORE than Microsoft charges to have open formats. And although I am supportive of both commercial and open source software initiatives, and have contributed to the open source community as a programmer, I honestly don't give a crap what our government thinks about it. This is a move in the right direction. I suspect it's motivated by money, however, and not a benevolent government desiring to increase the freedom of information.

Re:PDF?

[digidave]

"Anyone with IE on Windows can view .doc files without any additional software."

Well, that's the definition of vendor lock-in now, isn't it? Even MS fanboys can usually see that this is a bad thing. MS can abandon its old formats... and they will, eventually.

I think xPDF is available for Windows for free. It opens in about one second on Linux.

Re:PDF?

[Cthefuture]

Hmmm, the parent is not totally trolling here. I don't mind PDF but you have to keep in mind that it is generally a read-only format. Sure, you can edit it with the right tools but those tools are mostly proprietary or don't work very well in the case of the free tools.

Even the tools that can edit PDF are not usually very powerful. They're just for touchup type work. Most of your formatting and layout still needs to be done in a real editor and those output PDF OK, they don't read PDF.

Re:Whilst I applaud this move ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Those viewers work on MacOS X, Linux, *BSD, Syllable, AmigaOS, OS/2 & every other OS someone might be running, right?

Microsoft can garuantee that in 20 years time they will make available software that can still read documents produced with Microsoft Office today, right?

What do you mean "They're only available for Microsoft Windows."? What use is that? What about the .mi tax payers who don't use Windows? Your answer is "Make them pay even more money to view the documents" is it?

Open document formats are the only fair way to do it. It should have happened over a decade ago, and we certainly should not be perpetuating the problem.

Neither

[doublem]

MS will offer the state some discounts on Microsoft Office. If they're desperate they'll push RTF as a document format instead.

As we've seen far too many times in the past, government bodies tend to use moves like this as a way to force a better deal out of the existing vendor.

This isn't about using Open Source to build a better solution. It's about leveraging Open Source to get a better deal on the existing solution

Re:Taxachusetts

[AmosOtis]

You know, after four consecutive Republican governors common misperceptions tend to change. In fact, just because a state generates a lot of tax revenue doesn't mean it has high taxes - after all, Massachusetts is a federal tax exporter (it's federal tax revenue ends up subsidizing other (red) states, yes, even after the Big Dig!). So-called "Taxachusetts" is right in the middle of state income taxes in the country - 5% - the smaller states tend to have much higher income taxes. Kentucky has 6% on everything above $8k, Idaho has 7% above $7K, even a "big" state like Georgia has a 7% rate - they can't generate as much revenue, because median incomes aren't nearly as high.

From the Microsoft Bloglines...

[turchinc]

Microsoft is already blowing their bloghorn about this as well:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2005/08/ 31/458879.aspx

(and that reactions has been resyndicated by the Scobelizer himself already:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/01.html#a 11011)

From the post:
"I'm a bit stunned by the overall proposal that was brought forward to the State though as it seems to be a bit short sighted and unnecessarily exclusive."

"unnecessarily exclusive"? Someone at Microsoft is claiming that someone else's decision to use an open alternative is unnecessarily exclusive? That does seem like grasping for the last straw doesn't it...

Re:PDF?

[richlv]

yep, so that's where opendocument steps in (even though in articles it is refferred to as "open office format", i believe it will be od) - so you get pdfs for read-only stuff (reports, laws and other things citizens would not neet to edit normally ;) ) and odt/ods etc for things that could be edited (some forms that must be filled and other things like that)

Non Issue

[suitepotato]

The majority of PC users use Windows, those who don't have the ability to read most MS Office documents, and MS Office products have had the ability to save in earlier well documented formats not to mention RTF, CSV, etc. forever now.

If there's a semi-mythical complaint in desktop support for me, it has to be that "I can't open this proprietary document format" complaint. In over ten years I haven't gotten that once. The last time was a WordPerfect file in 1994 and the file was generated four years earlier.

Next thing you know, we'll hear whining and moaning aimed at Adobe for any nonstandard tchotchkes put into their PDF files. Why does it have to be up to the software vendors to correct the mistakes of those saving the files when they screw up by not saving in the most widely compatible format in the first place which they should have known to do since their very first PC using position?!

Re:Taxachusetts

[shadow_slicer]

Uh...That listing was ranked by ALL taxes, no just sales.
If you look at the site it says "State/Local taxes as % of per capita income", which to me implies that they took all the taxes into account.

As for your links, they do nothing to prove your points. Both your links reference the "economic freedom" rankings created by Pacific Research. Unfortunately I could find no information to describe exactly how they calculated these rankings. In addition rankings are a poor measure to go by because they obscure the actual differences between adjacent ranks.

Given the two data sets, I find the Tax Foundation's data (from the CNN link) infinitely more meaningful than that of Pacific Research.

If you could provide some actual data on how "liberal states have economic environments that are the most likely to screw poor people out of higher wages and opportunity", I'd love to read about it. Especially since my experience seems the other way around...

But as for it being biased, I don't quite see where you're getting that from.

Re:Acrobat Reader? Ugh...

[vidarh]

PDF isn't meant to be an editable format. It is a presentation format. If you need to be able to edit a document, you shouldn't be putting it in a PDF at all. PDF is for the final product, and that is exactly one of the things that appeals to a lot of it's users.

"Closed" formats are a pain.

[xmorg]

As a BSD user, I had to wipe my aunts computer due to virus's. After hours of scanning the computer wouldnt boot up.

Now each of her Works Documents have to be opened in the free "Word Viewer" copied and pasted into OpenOffice because she does not have the original software.

In response to PDF's being "closed", they may be owned by adobe, but at LEAST there is more than one way to view them, and they can be viewed and printed from any computer on a number of different applications. Also Adobe does offer Acrobat reader in some form or another for most systems.

Put it this way: a pdf or a wps of unknown version made in works?

it seeems to me ...

[Savage-Rabbit]

... that the state of Massachusetts bottom line is not just cost. They are arguing that open file formats = democracy and closed file formats don't which makes sense to me. A citizen should not be forced to invest money in proprietary software because that is the only way he/she can read official documentation. The current situation of publishing official electronic documentation in *.doc, *.xls or some other closed file format is akin to making law books publically available for free or at worst a small nominal fee but printing them in such a way that you must buy special glasses that can only be purchased from company X in order to read them. People take it for granted that laws and other such documents are publically available to anybody at minimal cost when the medium is paper and ink, why should any citizen have to shell out several hundred dollars for a MS Office suite in order to read the exact same material on his computer?

Re:Office 2003 Supports XML Just Fine

[Just Some Guy]

1) Use HTML as a standard

Which version? How do you embed formulas? How do you embed graphics? What archive format will you use to pack the whole mess up for distribution?

2) Use XML as a standard

Opendocument is a standardized XML representation, so I guess Mass. agrees with you completely.

3) Use RTF as a standard.

Does RTF support everything that Mass. may wish to embed in a document?

4) If all else fails, buy the $20 add-on program so you can save your Office documents as a PDF file.

Sounds good! Now you just need to make free PDF editors available to all your citizenry so that they can return completed forms to you.

I forget; what was your point again?

Re:Office 2003 Supports XML Just Fine

[MenTaLguY]

Use XML as a standard, which like [HTML] is already supported fully but Office 2003 (Word, Excel, and the others can read/write XML just fine).

I suspect you misunderstand what XML is. XML, in and of itself, is just a metasyntax. It doesn't really compare to HTML or RTF.

You could almost just as easily say "Use binary data as a standard, which like HTML is already supported fully but Office 2003 (Word, Excel, and the others can read/write binary data just fine)."

Which would be true, as far as it goes. Nearly all programs can read some form of binary data.

Similarly, just because two programs use some XML-based format doesn't mean they're automatically interoperable.

Finally, someone with reason...

[GoChickenFat]

regarding open formats: in the end, there's relatively little difference between an open and a closed format on a twenty-year timeline, from the perspective of the 98% group. Either way, they're not going to be the ones designing the conversion tool. If it's an open format, they have to hope that enough geeky guys with free time find it an interesting or relevant enough problem to solve. If it's a closed format, they have to hope that the company's still in business and updating its tools, or that it released something before it went belly-up, or that it opened its file formats, or that its developers are good samaritans. And here's the kicker: the 98% group does not know which of these alternatives is more likely to be the case. They probably don't realize the problem exists. It's not because they're stupid or willfully ignorant, because once again they only see the computer as a tool. You might as well call them stupid or willfully ignorant for not knowing what machine screws are used to hold their washing machine together.

stupid is relative...bring your C++, XML, and open source down to the farm (you know, the place where your food comes from) and see how far that'll take you.

Back when Microsoft was being pursued by the government my grandpa came up to me with the local newspaper and said "Who's this Microsoft and why is the government after them?". My grandpa never touched a computer, VCR, MP3 player, DVD, cell phone (he once accidentally hit the OnStar button in his truck and couldn't figure out where the voices were coming from) or even a tape player. He did however run a very successful 1000 acre farm and dairy and he lived a very long and happy life. He was 85 when he died a couple months ago and I still could never explain what I do beyond "I work with computers".

I'd give up all of this technology to live the life my grandpa had (as I build my second home file server/media pc). stupid is relative

Re:Office 2003 Supports XML Just Fine

[Just Some Guy]

I *am* claiming that Office files are a closed-standard that the majority of people can open, read, write, and use without installing anything on their computer. And don't free viewers exist for people who don't buy Office.

You don't get it. There is no version of Office or the free reader available for my system. It's much, much easier for you to download Open Office (for free), or get a free copy from the government (which they'd be legally allowed to give out) than for me to buy a new computer just to run MS Office.

If they were foolish enough to mandate MS Office as the official standard for incoming data, then that free reader turns into an expensive full-blown MS Office install. How convenient is that for Joe Taxpayer who wants to reply to his jury summons?

What about Innovation?

[morganew]

Biggest problem no one seems to be addressing is that the OpenOffice format is not guaranteed to be the most innovative, nor is it truly the lowest common denominator (like .rtf).

Wax cylinders were a 'format' for music, but we don't want the government locking out the use of CDs or DVDs just because the people with wax cylinder readers can't use them.

Backwards compatibility is important, but you certainly want to preserve the option to take technology that may innovate, even in the document format space, and provide better services to your constituents.

Here's a good example: early iterations of WordPerfect certainly didn't allow the complex tables and embedded images we have in current formats - heck, early HTML was barely functional for presenting text and pictures. What if we were only allowed to presever content in original WP formats, or HTML 1.0?

Governments should pick winners and losers by the quality of the technology, not ideology.

Build backwards compatibility into your contracts agreements with your vendors, and use the format that gives you the best technology.