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IBM Stresses Importance of OpenDoc to MA
gordoste writes "After announcing this past weekend that the WorkPlace line of products would support the OpenDocument set of standards, IBM has sent a letter to Massachusetts' governor promoting the software. They point out that the software was built in Massachusetts and that the French tax agency saves 10% on their IT budget as a result of moving to open standard software." From the article: "Designed at IBM's development lab in Westford, Massachusetts, the IBM Workplace Managed Client will help protect an organization's investment in corporate data by promoting consistency, reliability and open accessibility of its documents. As you know, Massachusetts is recognized across the globe as an incubator for software development ... What you may not know is that software is major growth engine for IBM, and solutions being developed at these IBM locations are being built on open standards because our customers are demanding choice and control over their information technology."
The title's reference to OpenDoc threw me. OpenDoc was an early component architecture developed and then abandoned by Apple in the 90s. Ahh, the days of CyberDog...
IBM's being persuasive in an indirect manner. (but affectively)
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http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20051205
"I'd like to share some information on an exciting new IBM product that was built in Massachusetts but is expected to have implications on both a national and international level."
It would have been nice to make the point without making the letter seem like a cold-call sales pitch. I found the first paragraph a bit off-putting - YGMMV.
To be honest attitudes like that are part of what holds the adoption of open source back. There is nothing wrong with that attitude, I share it - I am put off too, but OSS needs to get past that "by geeks for geeks" attitude *if* it wants to dominate.
It *is* a cold-call sales pitch. You can't hide that fact. IBM shows the honesty and integrity not to try to camoflauge things, this maintains their credibility. Secondly IBM has quite a bit of experience pitching products to large organizations and government agencies. I think we should defer to IBM's judgement in this case. Finally, I find the Massachusetts reference brilliant and an example of why we should defer to IBM. They are pitching to a politician. They just gave him the choice to either (1) Embrace local industry and help it compete on a global scale, creating local jobs and tax revenue or (2) give his next political opponent a stick to beat him with during an election for failing to do so, politics is local. Insights like this are how products and technologies are "sold", not via MS/OSS cost benefit analysis. The political will often trump the technical. Is this desirable? No, but it is how things work and OSS geeks need to face this reality. The professional sales and marketing people at IBM, Red Hat, etc do understand this.
They have all their online tax systems running on JBOSS, they are running around 4000 Linux servers. The savings are the yearly saving which they are making compared to the cost of running the old proprietary systems. These savings are not the savings on licences from MS alone as these applications would not have originally run on MS. The Desktop roll out for OO is next.