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

Re:So, which will MS Office support?

[Coryoth]

Currently, Microsoft office can't read or write either of these formats[1]. So which is Microsoft going to add?

Both? PDF is making steady inroads as an interchange format and from what I understand of Avalon it should make generating PDF on Vista pretty much as easy as on OS X. It would make sense to support it.

As for OpenOffice.org - they're using the OASIS format and Microsoft is a sponsor of that so you'd think they'd get around to it eventually. 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.

Jedidiah.

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

[ShieldW0lf]

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

Think about it, if you knew you could download OO.o for free and anyone with Office could open/edit/save the files you'd made in it, would you spend hundreds of dollars for Office? Hell, what could possibly motivate you to buy it at that point?

I would say that if MS opens the door to OO.o formats, they may as well just shoot themselves in the head and be done with it, because they're toast.

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[Short Circuit]

Michigan could do with a move like this. We're running a deficit and our economy's not getting any better. The Republican-controlled legislature is pushing tax cut after tax cut, without much in the way of spending cuts. Something like this could save some real dollars.

good idea not just because it goes "open"

[yagu]

In the posts here I see a lot of back-and-forth with some holding fast to the notion staying with MS Office is the prudent thing to do for various reasons including:

• MS Office can produce PDF docs
• MS Office docs can be viewed and printed using the free Microsoft Viewer software
• Probably the simplest solution is to Save As... RTF.

(bullets borrowed from Donny Smith(567043))

From personal experience I think the most important factor is getting out of MS' talons and whimsical changes to their own formats. I've posted about this before.

I've actually been in business meetings which couldn't not get started on time because attendees had to sort out getting copies of the agenda or memos which they'd actually received beforehand but were in formats incompatible with their version of MS Office! This, ostensibly at one company using tools to help conduct business. Were this a one-time anecdote would be one thing, but I encountered this scenario many times. (There are grooves in my eye-sockets from so many eyerolls waiting for business to proceed.)

OpenOffice may not offer the perfect solution, but any move away from unpredictable and untouchable formats brings hope to eventually working with technology that improves our productivity. (I shudder to mention the car analogy, but it's so fun: can you imagine a car industry with such an approach (or maybe it's the highway infrastructure)? Every year or so you find out some cars can't be driven on the highways because of some change it their design, blah, blah, blah.)

Re:As a Massachusetts Resident

[Shotgun]

When I was laid off, I spent nearly a year working as a security guard. ProEngineer was giving away a 3D CAD program, ProDesktop, so I thought I'd use all that late night desk time to draw up my airplane.

Fast forward a few months, ProEngineer decides the giveaway didn't make them much money, so they kill the program. They were nice though, and gave all the current users a 5-year liscense key to use their current copy.

Fast forward a year. My laptop crashes, and I have to wipe and re-install. My ProDesktop key is gone. I now have several megs of very detailed and very useless drawings.

This is the reason that governments should be using open formats. Thank you, Massachusetts. ...and all those Slashdotters claimed there wasn't a God.

Re:it seeems to me ...

[PriceIke]

Here's an example, not MS-based, but a true story and one that illustrates (I think) the GP's point.

One closed format is the QuickBooks one. Last year, as I went to start preparing my taxes, I opened up my business' QuickBooks file so I could generate reports for my accountant. Now, so there's no misunderstanding, I *puchased* this software about two years previous and was using it on my Mac G4 computer all that time. When I upgraded my OS several months prior, I backed up everything to another drive, performed the OS upgrade, and copied everything back. So when I went to open QuickBooks it acted like it had just been installed and asked for my serial number. No problem, I found it and entered it.

Then QuickBooks goes to match that against some nebulous database elsewhere on the net, and returns an error message: this serial number cannot be authenticated. Oh really? It was just fine when I entered it the first time. I tried again and again, always to get the same response. So I called Intuit to get a working serial number .. know what they told me? They don't support my version of QuickBooks anymore. If I wanted a new serial number that worked, I would have to buy the new version. The upgrade would cost me $200+shipping.

That's extortion. Maybe unintentional extortion, but extortion. If I wanted access to MY data using MY software on MY computer, I was going to have to pay them AGAIN. This was not an arragement I agreed to when I bought the software. Having no choice, I did, but it taught me an important lesson about software "ownership" and the rights and expectations of those who do business with companies like Intuit, like Microsoft, and others who, in the name of "security" and "copy-protection" are stripping away basic rights of legitimate users to use their legally purchased software and hardware.

If I had had an alternative to accessing my QuickBooks software file, especially an open source one, you bet your ass I would have used it.