Many feathers have been ruffled regarding the State of Massachusetts backing the OpenDocument standard, demanding it as the primary document archival and working standard in the near future. This is, of course, in direct opposition to Microsoft's plans with their Office XML format, a relatively open and transparent interchange format that they banked much of their hopes for Office 12 upon. Turns out that some took issue with the fact that, while otherwise it is gratis and open, Microsoft's licence basically limits GPLd applications from joining the Office XML game (not explicitly, but rather simply through an incompatibility. It isn't as insidious as it sounds).

While it might not seem like that big of a deal that one relatively small state dictated such a change, these sorts of things are almost always contagious - it is extremely likely that many other governments and levels of government will follow suit. Microsoft will almost certainly have to support OpenDocument, or will have to completely unencumber Office XML (they're 99% there, though many say even that will be too little, too late). We've already seen Microsoft surprizingly include PDF output functionality (though that's not enough to satisfy the State of Massachusetts), so it doesn't seem like much of a reach for Microsoft to capitulate and add OpenDocument functionality (it's probably largely just a document mapping/transformation type problem).

Nonetheless, one comment on a message board had me reminiscing about where .DOC once was, and where it is today. The writer in question, to paraphrase, opined that one would be cutting off their own nose to spite their face if they were to relinquish their ability to deal with Office files. "How would they communicate with other people and organizations?" they asked. Without the Office formats as the lingua franca, the implication was, they would be lost in a sea of unreadable files!

If someone said that to me six years ago, I would have certainly agreed: every document - from resumes to financial statements to installation instructions to inter-organizational communications - were .doc files. It was the ubiquitous document format. Compare that to today: Now the vast majority of resumes are transmitted as plain-text, html, or by using some ardous online resume builder (which behind the scenes is being stored in some proprietary format, or perhaps hr-xml). Financial statements, and virtually all layout specific documents are relayed as PDFs. Many other communications occur in rich-text or HTML email. In most of the places you would once find a .DOC file, you now find something in its place. Of course those are documents meant to be consumed, and at the source Microsoft Word most likely played a part, but the fact remains that Word becomes irrelevant once the document is transformed into one of these consumable document formats. The network effect lock-in is largely a thing of the past.

If I had to pick a turning point - the moment when .doc jumped the shark - it would have to be the Melissa virus. Suddenly innocuous document layout files that could be easily viewed and printed became a vector of contamination, with caveats and disclaimers about their handling. At that time I was doing software development at an engineering shop, and worked with HR in vetting resumes. It was shortly thereafter that we started investigating alternatives to people emailing us Word files, and we certainly weren't alone.

Of course Excel remains a critical document format, and if you share numbers in the industry it's likely that you see an .XLS file along the way.

XML does not equal open and transparent.

Binary* does not equal closed and proprietary.

*-An ambiguous term that most people use to mean "not XML"

Today marks the one month anniversary of the beginning of this blog. During that period I've put up a ton of content - really I've used it more as a straightforward CMS than a blog (my prior manual content management process was a mess, and this is just a world better). I've been very happy with the process and the feedback, and the excellent response I've seen from the community, and I most certainly plan on continuing: One nice thing about constantly mulling over ideas, and being able to type quickly, is that it only takes a few moments a day to maintain this.

Furthermore, a robust comment system is in the testing stage and will be live imminently, and hopefully it will give users a lot more of a voice to agree or (more likely) disagree. It will probably make it a lot more entertaining (for both readers and myself).

Thanks for making it worthwhile.

Dennis

After some pretty rampant speculation, it turns out that the big Google/Sun announcement was much ado about nothing. Basically they announced some strategic partnerships and cross-promotional agreements, for instance the Google Toolbar being bundled with the JVM (ignore the fact that this sort of thing usually disenfranchises customers). Zzzzzzz.

The world didn't change today, and it turns out that my use of the word "baseless" a couple of days ago was entirely on the mark. Phew, I was worried that I would look pretty silly about that.

What I find remarkable, though, is the things that people thought that Google would pull out of their hat today: From an amazing AJAX-enabled web Office Suite that would eviscerate Microsoft Office, to a full-scale operating system (again to attack Microsoft...all things revolve around Microsoft). The expectations were super-sized. While Google is undoubtedly a very technically capable firm full of some extremely clever people, and they've got a brilliant business plan that allows them to put more money and resources into web apps than just about anyone, the leap from Google Maps and Google Mail to an Office competitor is colossal.

Of course we've seen this sort of ridiculous over-estimation of Microsoft's competitors before. It's been the Year That Linux Takes The Desktop for half a decade now (isn't Microsoft supposed to be dead by now?), and the great Java Office suite is always just a little ways from being viably competitive, and of course the most famous of all was Netscape: Here was a company that put together a piece of software of a complexity level comparable to Windows accessory applications, and suddenly they were perceived as the company that was capable of anything - toss together a full-scale, feature rich operating system and all supporting applications? Why not! Netscape, despite delivering a couple of fairly simplistic applications, could accomplish anything in the eyes of many. Well, actually they couldn't, and their browser codebase started to rot until they were irrelevant, with scavengers picking at the corpse. Whoops!

I root for no side in the great Google versus Microsoft fight, and ultimately I hope the competition serves the consumer very well, however there needs to be some realism in the expectations that people are setting.

A psychology study performed in 1977 - The College-Bowl Study (Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz, 1977) - demonstrated a fascinating piece of human psychology, which was that people would over- or underestimate people's intelligence relative to their own, attributing undemonstrated qualities to them, based upon role or situation. They called this an "attribution error".

In the study subjects were split into two groups: the quizmasters and the contestants. The quizmasters were tasked with coming up with some challenging-but-not-impossible questions, which they then presented to the contestants as pairs. Invariably the contestants did poorly, as the quizmasters naturally relied upon their own unique proficiencies for material: Whether they quizzed about classical music, famous art, the Altair 8800, or chemistry, their knowledge (and thus what they thought was "challenging but not impossible") differed greatly from the contestants, as should be expected among a diverse group of people.

Amazingly, when asked afterwards about the intelligence of each other, the contestants overwhelmingly estimated the intelligence and knowledge of the quizmasters as greater than their own. Similarly, in a follow-up study an observer was added, and again the observer believed the the quizmaster was more intelligent than the contestant.

Of course this was a completely ridiculous conclusion: Not only were they randomly assigned arbitrary roles, but general knowledge tests applied across the group showed no correlation between role and intelligence. Logically it seems probable that there is a tremendous bulk of knowledge that the contestant holds that the questioner does not, but because it wasn't demonstrated it was unaccounted for. Out of "sight", out of mind.

This basic human tendency is pervasive, and it goes both ways: Some of us underestimate ourselves because we don't have the (often artificial, superficial, or temporal) domain knowledge of others ("I just saw an episode of Numbers, and boy do I feel dumb now..."), while others under-estimate people who don't share their particular grab-bag of facts ("Boy that guy is an idiot! The guy didn't even know what OPML is!". Us nerds are particularly guilty of this, discounting the incredible array of knowledge and skills that people in other fields have, instead judging them on their knowledge of Linux distros or esoteric Windows shortcut keys. This is a tremendous vice).

Take advantage of this human trait! The next time you're having a big meeting, bone up on fringe facts and edge questions for your peers. Learn some irrelevant facts about an uncommon area - for instance beetles or metallurgy - and bring it up at every opportunity. I just took advantage of this myself, talking about the fairly obvious observations of a 28-year old study. Aren't I clever.

I've taken a look a Microsoft's competitor to Google Maps several times, and each time I've been struck by the incredibly poor coverage of Canada: Not only is the search completely useless for Canadian addresses (even when you've very clearly indicated that you're looking in Canada, which is odd as they had great data on Canada in ancient MapPoint releases), the hilarity is compounded by the fact that the satellite imagery stops right at the border. Whether it's an imagery rights issue or not, it is quite contrary to the whole "Earth" thing in the product name. Maybe Microsoft Virtual United States of America on Earth is a more accurate name.

Of course Microsoft, being largely an American company, is entirely within its rights focusing on the US marketplace, just as I'm entirely within my rights to complain about it. It seems odd that something like satellite imagery has national boundaries, and it seems more likely that some product manager deep within the intestines of Microsoft decided that the hassle and storage of dealing with Canada wasn't worth the bother, and thus was it wiped from the map. A bit of a foolish decision given that there's a fair number of us, and given that it's cold most of the year we all tend to have high speed connections and predisposition to spending lots of time online.

An article was mentioned on Slashdot regarding Google's (or Yahoo's) creation of some sort of web-based Office suite. While the story is actually baseless speculation (it is supported as much as the title of this entry is), it did make me pause and contemplate where Google is going next. Consider for a moment that Google's primary innovation hasn't really been new products or technologies, but rather a business model and transactional efficiency that allows them to offer unprecedented amounts of processing, storage and bandwidth for users: Google has managed to make money offering services that most thought prohibitively costly. Google has absolutely redefined the market, and continues to do so with each release.

Given that Google has become a market leader, I see no reason why Google needs to continue to be tied to DHTML. Even with the so-called AJAX, HTML is realistically too coarse for something as rich as an Office suite (don't get me wrong - I was making highly dynamic engine control systems, using "AJAX" style methods, over 5 years ago. Nonetheless it is primarily a document layout technology, and shouldn't be shoehorned into every need). It would be a waste of engineering manpower to attempt to solve that problem with the wrong technologies.

I can entirely foresee Google completely splitting from HTML for some products - Google is one company that could release new services accessible via RDP or some other streaming graphical or vector format, and it would be immediately embraced by the community. If Google didn't leverage an existing technology, but instead invented something new, they would undoubtedly release it as a standard. A real Web 2.0 would be born.