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According to Wikipedia the term FUD was first defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company, Amdahl Corp.: “FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instil in the minds of potential customers who might be considering Amdahl products.”

As Eric S. Raymond writes: “The idea, of course, was to persuade buyers to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors’ equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors’ equipment or software. After 1991 the term has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.”

The FUD machine has been hard at work for IBM throughout this whole process,  despite loud and frequent protests that this isn’t the case.

My colleagues at Microsoft have asserted all along that much of this debate is principally driven by a competitive position between a small number of vendors, something that has again been denied by IBM.

As usual though reality does not match the words.

As an example, one by one discussions with national standards bodies here in the Asia Pacific region have been quietly moved by mysterious third party lobbying from a positive collaborative effort into a beauty competition or face-off, generally with Microsoft and our partners on one side of the table and IBM and a small collection of their allies on the other, sometimes the allies change but the pre-agreed talking points rarely do.

Events have played out in the media and in the blogosphere over the last couple of weeks that represent a breakdown of some of those anti-OpenXML arguments that have been played back so frequently over the last year.

Arguments that there is a lack of demand for Open XML, the specification is too complex to implement, the specification can’t be deployed cross platform and the long running but baseless claim that the Ecma-376 specification might be encumbered by IPR and patent threats all appear to have been cast aside as big blue steps up to meet the demands of their own customers and the market in general.

Here is a blow by blow review of the relevant activity over the last two weeks…

Thursday, 17th Jan: Brian Jones posted a blog entry talking a little about the support that Google is adding to their search products to render OpenXML documents to HTML for simplified viewing. One of the comments on that post added some facts around IBMs own support for OpenXML in some of their products, something that we had not gone looking for, nor did we expect to find given IBMs fierce anti-OpenXML stance.

Friday 18th Jan: Several of my colleagues found this point interesting enough to blog about… so Doug Mahugh, Stephen McGibbon,  Gray Knowlton and myself all went ahead and did so.  Stephen (who, like myself, heralds from the north of England and wields a great northern English sense of humour) hypothesised in his post that we might be about to see an announcement from IBM at Lotusphere in relation to their growing support for the OpenXML file format.

Sunday 20th Jan: In an article titled “Whoops! IBM products support Microsoft’s Open XML doc format” Computerworld’s Eric Lai picked up the story, to quote his article;

Nobody has invested more in defeating Microsoft Corp.’s Office Open XML document format than IBM.

So why is IBM supporting Open XML in a handful of its products?

According to technical documentation on IBM’s own Web sites, the company already supports Open XML, the native file format of Microsoft Office 2007, in at least four of its programs.

Monday 21st Jan: This is where the wheels start to come off the IBM strategy a little. Rob Weir, one of IBMs standards experts and their Chief of creating anti-OpenXML news, went out of his way to post a lengthy protestabout what he had read on the “Microsoft Blogger echo chamber”, he argued that although IBM clearly supports OpenXML in a number of their products that they actually don’t. A confusing position at best.

Wednesday 23rd Jan: In yet another confusing post Bob Sutor, a senior vice president of IBM, posted an article on his personal blog entitled “While you’re waiting, don’t save in OOXML format“, the premise of his article was that the ballot resolution meeting in Geneva may change the specification of OpenXML so whatever you do don’t save any documents in the current format, if you do the sky might fall.

If we apply Bob’s argument to the Open Document Format (ODF), or any other document format for that matter, then it just isn’t safe for us to save documents and probably never was. ODF 1.0 is the version that the world knows as ISO26300, it is ODF 1.1 and 1.2 where there have been some significant advances in the file format specification (adding many accessibility features, working hard on adding spreadsheet formula support, etc) so I guess that they probably shouldn’t be used either due to the fact that one day they will be deprecated, according to the argument.

Of course this makes no sense, technology and standards evolve, they always have and always will. It is safe to use ODF today, it is safe to save in legacy binary formats today and of course it is safe to use OpenXML as your document format of choice.

Thursday 24th Jan: It seems that Stephen’s comment around an announcement at Lotusphere about IBM’s growing support for OpenXML was less to do with humour and more of a prophecy.

This morning Stephen blogged about an announcement that has indeed filtered out during Lotusphere confirming that IBM will support OpenXML in their Lotus Collaboration and various Portal products. Martin LaMonica was the source of this story, an entry in his blog titled “IBM to take Lotus Symphony apps ‘Beyond Office’“.

LaMonica quotes Doug Heintzman, director of strategy for IBM collaboration technologies;

“We strongly believe that an enormous amount of innovative potential has been held back by the network effects around the file formats and the proprietary control that Microsoft has had around those formats,” he said.

IBM favors ODF as a file format because it is “truly open” and technically elegant, Heintzman said.

But IBM will support Open XML, which is the current document format in Office 2007, in its Lotus collaboration and portal products. IBM already supports older versions of Office.

It is hard to know exactly how to interpret that… it appears on the face of it that Heintzman approves of the steps that Microsoft is taking to open up what have traditionally been proprietry document formats, and it is great to see confirmation that OpenXML will indeed be supported by the Lotus Collaboration and Portal products.

I need ask Stephen to suggest some lottery numbers for me…