New York and Minnesota Publish Open Document Studies

Multiple readers have written to point out that New York and Minnesota have reached the end of their lengthy deliberations on open document formats. Both reports agree that an open format would be beneficial, but neither were willing to endorse a particular choice. New York's executive summary notes, "The State Legislature should not mandate in statute the use of any specific document creation and preservation technologies, as technologies can easily become outdated." Minnesota's report claims, "The marketplace is still in flux, and it is not certain that a single standard will emerge." In related news, yesterday's announcement from Microsoft that they would provide support for ODF in a future update to Office 2007 has EU antitrust investigators optimistic, but cautious. Microsoft has said that the ISO process was what prevented OOXML from receiving support in the same time frame.

Comments

Re:Goes to show

[TRAyres]

Paper letters? See, you're already having to put things into outdated formats for politicians to understand them.

Re:Clueless legislators...

[Anonymous Coward]

iomplementation

Your typo reminds me of a sign a student IBM 370 operator used to hang on the window between the computer room and the card reader/printer room when he got the system "unstuffed".

"I/O, I/O so it's off to work we go."

So I read your typo as "compliant I/O implementation". Apologies for the offtopic comment but thought others might share the groaning looping laughter I received from the thought process dump.

Embrace Extend Extinguish in 3..2..1..

[turing_m]

Minnesota's report claims, "The marketplace is still in flux, and it is not certain that a single standard will emerge."

Well, it looks like we standardized on MS-ODF. It has all the benefits of ODF, but with new, undocumented features that we all can't live without, such as uh, ribbontables.NET. We may not be able to read this format in 20 years by a non Microsoft application, but according to independent studies funded by Microsoft, our productivity will increase 150% in the meantime.