MS Anti-ODF Lobbyist Named As MA Tech Advisor

Andy Updegrove writes "For the last year and a half, Massachusetts has been a battleground between Microsoft, on the one hand, and IBM, Sun and open standards advocates on the other over the state's plans to implement ODF. That effort has sparked similar initiatives around the world that threaten to erode Microsoft's multi-billion dollar profits on Office software. Now, we have a new governor set to take office, and observers are waiting to see if he will continue to support ODF like his predecessor, or back off in favor of Microsoft Office. Last week, Governor-Elect Deval Patrick named a new transition advisory group to make recommendations on the state's IT structure, and one of the eight members he appointed was none other than the Microsoft lobbyist that has been leading the charge to not only defeat ODF in the Bay State, but to gut the power of the State's CIO and Information Technology Division as well. Not a good sign of independence from special interests for an administration that has yet to even take office."

Comments

Will It really help all that much?

[CastrTroy]

I don't know if having the world settle on one single file format will help much. I mean, for the web, we have HTML+CSS, but it seems like Microsoft has some "bugs" in their implementation, and since IE is the most popular browser, we're all forced to make webpages that adhere to the MS way of doing things. I imagine the same thing might happen, if ODF was mandated as the standard. MS would make a bug-ridden ODF reader/writer for MSWord, which would still be what most people would use, because that's what they're familiar with, and we'd be stuck in the same boat as we are with HTML. If you didn't use MS Word, then you would end up having a document that didn't look quite the way it's supposed to.