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."

Comments

OpenDoc != OpenDocument

[santiago]

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...

that's a good thing, actually

[penguin-collective]

The non-commercial and public angle is made well enough already by the people who are in a position to make such arguments. IBM is a commercial software vendor and they wouldn't fool anybody into thinking otherwise if they tried.

Overall, I think it's a good thing that big vendors are advertising their products by stressing the value of open document formats to potential buyers because it shows that the formats are commercially supported and that businesses have an interested to continue to support them. The more commercial sales pitches MA gets for products using open document formats, the easier it will be for them to adopt such formats.

Not unique

[Tony]

Not least there's the cost of re/training staff to use new software.

1. This is true for every major upgrade of MS-Office, as well. It is not unique to switching to a "different" document editing suite.

Iif you're not using MS Office you may find a lot of your secretarial staff are keen to leave .. they need to keep their skills current just as much as the resident IT geeks .. and in the secretarial world 'current' = latest version of Office.

See point 1. You just contradicted the whole "training/retraining" point you made earlier. And this is one of the most ludicrous statements I've heard in defence of MS-Office. Granted, I haven't worked in an office dedicated to creating documents since my university-worker days, but I've never met an office worker who would quit their job over MS-Office. Even those that insisted on WordPerfect (back when it was king, and MS-Office was the also-ran) made the transition to another office suite just fine.

While it's nice to say "these guys saved 20 million Euros" I wouldn't take that figure as red. They might have saved 20m euros on Microsoft licences (yay!), but what did the change cost elsewhere? Was that 20m euros really an overall saving?

This is an excellent point.

I think it will be worth it, just because they *are* moving to an open standard. It might cost a little bit up front, but over the next decade, it will save a tremendous amount of money. Hell, just being able to put the office suite licensing out to bid (which you sure as hell can't do if you use MS-Office document formats) should provide a bit of competition, which is good for the citizen or organization spending their hard-earned cash.

IBM taking the long view

[HangingChad]

I think this is a good long term strategy by IBM. Before you can take on an entrenched monopoly, there has to be an alternative support structure in place. This appears to be IBM building that foundation of standards which will ultimately undermine MSFT's monopoly position.

Nice to see a company breaking out of the quarter-to-quarter mind set and building a long term strategy for their success. And, oh yeah, a lot of us will also benefit from the sea change.