Oliver Bell’s weblog

As I travel around Asia the term “Creative Economy” is one that comes up more and more frequently, it is a concept that has been around for a while but only recently seems to have earned a place in discussions around information and communication technology here in the region.

The concept of the Creative Economy is a straight forward enough one, the Wikipedia article I have linked above describes the concept as;

The phrase Creative Industries (or sometimes Creative Economy) refers to a set of interlocking industry sectors, and are often cited as being a growing part of the global economy. The creative industries are often defined as those that focus on creating and exploiting intellectual property products; such as Music, books, film, and games, or providing business-to-business creative services such as Advertising, Public Relations and Direct Marketing.

This definition is a very western one and clearly applies well to industry sectors you would expect to find a clear focus around in Europe and North America. In conventional terms it is, of course, also applicable to Asia but when I hear it used here there is also a more relevant local meaning.

One of the challenges that many of the emergent economies appear to share at the moment is around finding ways to protect and capitalize on their traditional industries, including handicrafts, artistry, performance and so on. Many of these traditional industries can be quickly copied and mass produced elsewhere, an ongoing risk for local businesses and livelihoods.

As a result discussions often revolve around how countries in the region might protect both the ownership and integrity of these traditional industries while at the same time planning for the future. In many cases this involves looking at the policy that is needed to help these traditional industries thrive and grow, and the legal framework that has evolve to protect them.

We are left with the question “What has all this got to do with Information and Communication Technology?”

An interesting point of evolution. A common theme appears to be that the work that many countries are undertaking today to build their Creative Economies is being done with the goal of laying the foundations for the development of new industries including ICT.

A strong understanding of the countries business structures, protection of intellectual property, mentorship and solid investment frameworks all helping protect the existing industries that are important today, and prepare countries for the industries that they want to build for tomorrow.

The principal here is pretty straight forward, beginning with a framework that supports the growth of existing industries in the region makes a lot more sense than trying to create a framework for an industrial sector, such as ICT, that represents future as apposed to current growth. At the same time legal and policy frameworks being built today are already taking future needs into account and preparing countries for the exciting future ahead…

The laziest type of blog post is one that just quotes a bunch of other people and adds little value in its own right, I tend to use this blog as a combination of a place to document some of my own views and a place to store my own notes as various events of interest take place, so I know that from time to time I’m guilty of over quoting.

This post is a combination of the two. Whenever Microsoft makes an announcement that is blog worthy there are generally two types of post that get generated, initially there is quick commentary on the announcement itself, but then shortly afterwards more considered words start to appear as people take time to think though the details.

This morning I thought it might be worthwhile bundling together some of the other posts that are out there, positive and negative.

So, here are a few of the more notable entries that are floating around this morning, for those interested in the topic of Microsoft and our support for both interoperability and document formats I think this makes for a reasonable round up of many of the views that are out there.

In each case I have pulled out a small quote from the posts I have linked, I would encourage you to follow the links and read the whole post though - there will always be more to digest than just my brief extract.

OpenMalaysiaBlog, Yoon Kit Yong - “Microsoft Office Supports ODF? AYE!”

However, I am an optimist, and I do hope that the Microsofties driving ODF support in core Microsoft applications are sincere in their intent. So far, I don’t see too much of the smarmy doublespeak this time in their press release, and I really applaud the guys for that. Although they tried to dilute the ODF subject with PDF (didnt they already have that last year?) and XPS (who really uses that?) and UOF (ni hui jiang ODF ma?), the message is quite clear.

So overall, its very encouraging. I hope Microsoft follows through with this announcement, and does not mess it up when they finally release the patch.

Before today, it used to be very hard in taking these statements seriously  …

“…  it is very important that customers have the freedom to choose from a range of technologies to meet their diverse needs.”
-  July 2006Jean Paoli, GM of Interoperability and XML architecture at Microsoft

… but now its definitely reads a lot less hypocritical.

Kudos Microsofties, and I wish your team and efforts well

Strong and supportive words indeed from one of the louder voices driving for ODF adoption here in the region. Yoon Kit and Ditesh (two of the principal bloggers at OpenMalaysia) frequently bring a blunt sense of reality to the way that the work that we do across the region is received by the FOSS community.

I’m pretty pleased to see Yoon Kit carrying a sense of optimism around what we’re doing here, but would encourage them both to keep our feet held close to the fire as we deliver on the promises we’re making!

NOOOXML.org - “Microsoft finally playing nice?”

A press release from Microsoft now promises native ODF support in the next service pack for Office 2007, while full support for the ISO version of OOXML will have to wait until the next major release of Office. Have they finally realized that their “format war” was a lost cause, and that the formal ISO acceptance of DIS29500 was a victory only on paper? If this is an honest attempt to play nice, it is a very welcome move. Of course, only time will tell if they will deliver on this promise, but the tone has changed dramatically, and this might actually be a good time to celebrate. We wish to welcome Microsoft to the party, even though they are very late and managed to make a fool of themselves in the process of trying to fight this outcome in every way possible. Had they only made this move a year ago, it would have saved many people a lot of trouble, including themselves. It is probably safe to assume that it was the strong opposition that forced them to the ODF table.

Pretty encouraging words from a site that was originally set up to oppose the work that we did to standardize the OpenXML file format. It is unfortunate that this is still seen as some kind of “Document Format War”. I still hold a strong view that different document formats serve different purposes. Our announcement yesterday is demonstrable of that point of view, support for ODF adds to the 20+ formats that Microsoft Office already supports, and as additional customer demand comes forth I would not be surprised to see that list continue to grow over the years.

Arnaud Le Hors - “My take on why Microsoft finally decided to support ODF”

One trick they could try and pull for instance would be to put just enough support for ODF to claim that they support it but not enough for people to really use it systematically. They could then tell customers who complain something isn’t working that it’s because ODF isn’t powerful enough, and if they want the full power of Office they need to use OOXML. That’d be a sneaky way to fulfill the ODF requirement set by customers and then force people into using OOXML anyway. Sneaky but not unlike Microsoft unfortunately. So, beware.

Reading assumptions about why we’re doing what we’re doing is always fun, I would like to think that just about everything possible is on the table and out in public view at this point, anything beyond that is just conjecture.

Maybe we’re also planning to take total control of the worlds chocolate supply, after all we do have an office in Switzerland. Next time I’m attending a planning meeting in our secret pacific island volcano I’ll ask around and see what I can uncover.

Francois Ragnet - “Microsoft opens up Office to open document formats”

Interesting to see how Microsoft have moved away from their proprietary document formats, which were previously considered as their “crown jewels”, and now focus their innovation efforts on the applications themselves. More surprising though, is the fact that Office 2007 will not support OOXML, Microsoft’s own competing format for ODF, which they recently “fast-tracked” through ISO approval. In any event, this is great news for the Future of Documents, as this is a major step towards one open document format for easy interchange between applications.

François raises an interesting point. I totally agree, innovation around office suites in general from now on will come through improvements in usability, accessibility and the role of the suite as a developer platform.

Value of an office suite will increasingly be measured thorough a combination of increased individual and group productivity and the role of that suite in integrated and diverse business processes.

Jesper Lund Stocholm - “No reason anymore to mandate anything but ODF?”

A lot of people are now spinning information about this move pulling the rug under OOXML and that ODF should be mandated everywhere - but nothing could be further from the truth. The reason why we approved OOXML still stands and the incompatible feature-sets of OOXML and ODF did not suddenly become compatible. There are still stuff in OOXML that cannot be persisted in ODF and vice versa. The backwards compatibility to the content in the existing corpus of binary documents is still a core value of OOXML and this incompatibility of ODF has not disappeared. You will still loose information and functionality when you choose to persist an OOXML-file in ODF … just as you would when persisting it to old WordPerfect formats. Insisting that having ODF-support in Microsoft Office (12 SP2) makes the need for OOXML go away is a moot point - since I am sure no one would argue to replace OOXML with TXT - simply because TXT is a supported format in Microsoft Office.

Ditto. Microsoft’s support and commitment to the OpenXML format is as strong as it ever was. As Jesper highlights for Denmark, OpenXML provides functionality that is key for customers, partners and the IT ecosystem as a whole. Support for one document format will never negate the need for another that is designed for a different purpose.

Groklaw, Pamela Jones - “Microsoft supporting ODF? –Close, But No Cigar”

I wish I could wholeheartedly applaud the Microsoft announcement about native support for ODF, but I can’t. Of course, it’s better to have native support for ODF, no matter what motives may have influenced Microsoft’s announcement, and I’m glad about that for the sake of end users. But it hasn’t happened yet. Was the word ‘vaporware’ not coined for Microsoft? In any case, I’m in the “I will believe it when I see it” category when it comes to Microsoft. They’ve earned my caution.

Fair enough Pamela, it is up to us to deliver from here, no disagreement there. Enough said. You might want to look up the word ‘vaporware’ though, it wasn’t coined for Microsoft!

Alex Brown - “Microsoft Moves to Support ODF Standard”

Whatever Microsoft’s motivations, users are set to benefit from a world in which MS Office, easily the most used office software, has aligned itself with open, documented standards. But while announcementsare all well and good the true test of Microsoft’s commitment will be found in the byte-by-byte details of the files that Office reads and writes. ODF lays down some strict rules for how these XML documents must be in order to be conformant, and software exists for testing them – I look forward on this blog to holding the magnifying glass to Microsoft’s efforts to see if what is claimed to be Standard really is so. Success will deserve praise; failure will deserve correction.

Alex has an interesting (as in genuinely interesting, not as in curious) role to play in the evolution of both OpenXML and ODF thorough his position in SC34. Ultimately ISO/JTC1 SC34 will be the working group who not only lead both the evolution of these formats, but also help the world understand what interoperability between formats actually means and how it can be best achieved.

Sheri McLeish - “Microsoft Crashing The Party: Announces Intent to Support ODF And Join Standards Boards”

Wow. Microsoft opened up today, taking a nearly 180-degree turn to announce its intent to support ODF, PDF, and XPS. Overall, this is a great, positive move. While unexpected, it’s not surprising. Microsoft has been moving toward more open standards, like with its recent DAISY XML initiative. But it’s also a no-brainer. Sticking exclusively with its competing Open XML was divisive, complicating IT’s efforts to leverage the benefits that open source XML provides.

This is back to that point around the value of Microsoft Office supporting multiple standards. What I see in Microsoft’s moves is a position that is driven by market and customer demands. Following needs of the community of companies and people who use our software seems to be the right route to take, and that is really what the addition of ODF to the list of supported formats in Microsoft Office is all about. 

Glyn Moody - “Microsoft and ODF: Has Hades Gone Sub-Zero?”

As Microsoft well knows, these markets are where most of the future growth can be expected. If they are bent on ODF adoption regardless of ISO ratification for OOXML, Microsoft will effectively be shut out of the hottest markets unless it builds some bridges (one of its favourite metaphors at the moment). Supporting this view is the fact that Microsoft’s latest announcement also includes news support for the less well-known (in the West, at least) Chinese national document file format standard, Uniform Office Format (UOF).

Again - more commentary on following customer and market demand. UOF (Uniform Office Format) is a big deal for us here in Asia, our neighbor to the north is keen to see it as the principal format for documents produced in China.

Rick Jeliffe - “Success has a thousand fathers…”

Developers/standarizers on both sides need to be whacked on their heady heads with a mackeral that Not Invented Here is not acceptable. I think people accept that until now there have been reasonable excuses: that Office could not implement ODF before it existed, that Office could not use ODF as its default format until ODF had even minimal features and completeness, that OpenFormula could be syntactically incompatible with everyone else’s spreadsheet syntax, that ODF’s graphics could cherry pick SVG without really providing actual SVG compatibility (SVG Tiny please?), and so on. (Actually, I don’t mean NIH in the sense that there absolutely cannot be multiple syntaxes or technologies for the same thing if there is some historical reason or feature difference, I am primarily talking about rejecting features merely because of their provenance.) The state of the schemas for DIS 29500 mark 1 and ODF 1.0 just reveal their level of maturity and production-level adoption, and there is nothing wrong with being an adolescent. ODF and OOXML will grow up, and they need the partisan spirit and the NIH attitude to be kept under control to do so.

I left this one until last because I think it goes to the heart of where we all need to go, and how we should think about operating from here.

Choice in document formats isn’t a war, it is a discussion, different people and groups hold different views and none can be considered wrong. Participation in the development of ODF and OpenXML provides a platform for these discussions, and a forum for resolution of the technical, political and in some cases ideological issues that need to be resolved.

I personally think we’re on a good path at the moment, but will agree with Pamela’s comment that it is principally up to us to deliver from here…

There are no shortage of press and blog stories this morning sharing the news that Microsoft has committed to supporting version 1.1 of the Open Document Format in SP2 of Office 2007.

As the announcement happened while those of us here in Asia were sleeping peacefully pretty much everything that could have been said on the topic has already been said, so I thought it might be more useful to present more of a round up of what I’ve been reading this morning.

First of all a little about the announcement itself.

There is a lot more to this than just support for ODF in the Microsoft Office product, although obviously the native support for ODF is a focus for many of the words that have been written overnight.

The company also announced plans to offer greater support for a number of alternative document formats - including Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and XML Paper Specification (XPS) - within Word 2007, Excel 2007 and PowerPoint 2007.  

In addition, Microsoft will support the future maintenance and evolution of these format standards by participating on the standards committees charged with these activities. This means that Microsoft folks will join the OASIS ODF TC and participate alongside IBM, Sun, Novell and everybody else present.

Finally ODF will be added to the list of specifications that are covered by the Open Specification Promise, ensuring that every developer has access to any intellectual property that Microsoft might put forwards during these maintenance processes.

The Microsoft blogs that first carried the announcement were the usual folks.

Jason Matusow looks at this announcement in the context of the companies continuing commitment to interoperability as a tenant of the way we design products and collaborate with the rest of the industry. Jason and I share views on the issue of so called “single standards” and he eloquently explains that further in his post.

This is not about any one document format “winning” – it is about enabling customers to evaluate and use document formats that make the most sense for them. Just as the MS deal with JBOSS didn’t mean we were saying that J2 was better than .NET – it is that we want our customers to have the most positive experience possible when using our product.

Doug Mahugh talks about some of the more technical details of the announcement, as well as discussing what this means to existing initiatives. He talks about our continued commitment to the translator projects for ODF, DAISY, UOF etc. and links to the ODF Translator team blog where they have just kicked off version two of that project.

Finally Doug answers a question I was asked over dinner earlier this week… we’ll be adding APIs that allow third parties to intercept the ODF load and save paths so if anybody disagrees with our implementation then all the tools are available for them to write their own.

Gray Knowlton digs around the “Why?” question, again one that came up in my dinner conversation earler this week. Why now? Why when OpenXML just got approval? etc.

Success in our industry (like a lot of other industries) boils down to successfully addressing the needs of customers. By offering greater choice for file formats, our products address more scenarios and provide greater flexibility in enabling specific solutions. From a pragmatic standpoint, adding ODF to Office allows us to re-focus Office on product capabilities rather than a debate about file formats. We’re quite comfortable when we compete in the marketplace on these merits.

Looking around the blogosphere this morning the announcement appears to be very well received by just about everybody, as I said earlier in this post most people seem to be focused on the component of this announcement that talks about native ODF support in Microsoft Office, but it is important to recognize that this is bigger than just that one item.

The announcement, in my view, demonstrates a strong commitment to the Interoperability Principles that we shared earlier this year. As always there is still much work to be done, but this is a great step in the right direction.

If you want to read a little more then here are some links that you might find useful. There is a lot more out there, feel free to link anything addition that you find in the comments of this post.

Press: PC World NZ, Information Week, CNet News, SD Times, New York Times, itWire, Slashdot(!)

Blogs: Stephen McGibbon (MS), Jerry Fishenden (MS), Brian Jones (MS), Jesper Lund Stocholm, Richard Koman, Andy Updegrove, Bob Sutor, Ed Brill, GeekZone NZ, Joe Wilcox, Eric White (MS), Savio Rodrigues

On a final note, I feel compelled to pull one paragraph out of Bob Sutor’s (IBM) post;

There is no reason for more governments and organizations not to start mandating the use of ODF. If you are not using ODF today, you should put adoption plans in place.

There is an area where Microsoft and IBM seem to disagree.

My own personal view on this, which appears to be shared by a majority of the customers I work with, is that mandating a single standard for anything IT related is generally not a great move for government.

IT standards, like any area of technology, move on.

Governments need to remain ready to move with the technology that is in use by their citizens and businesses, mandates for information technology standards often do little more than operate as a hurdle to doing this.

A couple of posts caught my eye this morning, representing very closely related discussions from opposite sides of the globe.

One from New Zealand, and a second from the United Kingdom.

Rod Drury, CEO of Xero, shares some insight into discussions taking place in New Zealand around how to encourage increased growth in the local IT industry by putting the right policy framework in place.

Some of the conclusions and ideas include;

Some of the general themes we’d like as an industry would be around

• Encouraging more people into the industry
• Certification programs
• Immigration
• Education

But what would be some specific and measurable things we could achieve if we worked together?

Here are some that I’ve been thinking of.

1. Establishment of an ICT procurement ombudsman, so that procurement issues can be raised without the vendor being penalized in the market.
2. A work visa program between New Zealand and Silicon Valley so that we can send our talented people up to work there for a few years and bring experts down here tightening the relationship between ourselves and the center of the tech universe.
3. R&D tax credits limits lifted if you are exporting products developed from that R&D.
4. The industry supporting Government initiatives on Online Identity Management for individuals and businesses facilitating electronic commerce. We could lead the world here.

Rod goes on to invite wider participation in this conversation, I suspect he is looking for strong voices from New Zealand, personally I think this is a good discussion to be having across the region.

There are some interesting ideas being raised in the comments.

At the same time my colleague Jerry Fishenden posted a list of sound bytes from NESTA’s Innovation Edge event that was held in the UK this week.

The final quote that Jerry picked up gives a lot of food for thought;

“In the 20 years to come there will be more innovation and disruption than in the last 100 years”

Every national government should probably be asking itself how it prepares for the significant change that will be driven by innovation in the IT industry, how it will position it’s local economy and how it will manage the social evolutions that these changes will bring.

The whole list is worth a read, and I think complements the conversation that Rod is having in New Zealand pretty well.

Much like the current dip in activity around eGovernment, discussions and policy that relate to how we create the right environment for a thriving IT industry in countries around the region seem to have slipped in priority over recent years.

It is encouraging to see these conversations appearing back on the agenda and bringing forth new thinking and ideas.

Several news organizations are reporting that the One Laptop Per Child project and Microsoft have reached an agreement to offer Windows XP as an option for countries choosing the OLPC platform for the classroom.

Fortune Magazine’s online site for example;

Making Windows available on the XO could make it far more palatable for developing-world governments to make the huge investment necessary to purchase large numbers of XOs for their children. “It’s a very big deal,” said OLPC chairman Nicholas Negroponte in an interview.

He has for three years unsuccessfully attempted to get governments to buy the laptop in lots of a million or more. Governments have so far put in firm orders for a total of 600,000 machines, and several hundred thousand are now in use. The greatest number is in Peru, followed by Uruguay, Mexico, with fewer in Rwanda, Cambodia, Mongolia and Haiti, among other countries.

Stephen McGibbon has linked a video demonstrating XP running on the XO, using a number of the unique features of the device, and performing well.

Here Bohdan Raciborski from Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group demos Windows and Office running on the XO, and mentions that performance seems reasonable - starting in a quarter of the time the original OS did. Bohdan also shows the electronic book mode.

And James Utzschnider has more details on his blog;

Following the Gates meeting and a series of conversations with Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, Microsoft made a key concession. It will enable what’s called a “dual boot,” which means Windows will work alongside the XO’s original Linux operating system. Users will be able to choose which one to use. That required a big change in Microsoft’s approach, given its longstanding aversion of open source.

From my own conversations with government folks around the region here in Asia, I think that overall this will be a welcome addition to the project, offering more choice to users of the device as they learn about the technology and use the device for education in the classroom.

When I was setting this blog up I happened to also be playing with some of the Windows Live services for another project and for fun thought I would tie in free email @osrin.net for anybody who wanted it using the Windows Live hosted services.

It was easy to set up, and there appear to be over five hundred people who have since signed up to use it - or at least registered accounts.

Setting it up was very straight forwards. Just a few easy steps;

1. Register the domain that you want to use - MSN will provide some options for domain hosting as well as you sign into the domain management in step 2 if that is easier for you
2. Go to http://domains.msn.com and register your domain with the hosted services site
3. Note down the mail servers that MSN allocates to you
4. Edit the “MX” records for your domain to point to MSN’s servers. Most domain management companies offer you an easy way to do this.

From there MSN provide you with a sign-up link and graphic that you can provide to your users, to check their mail they just need to go to http://mail.live.com and sign in.

I pulled the links out of the graphic and integrated them into my site template instead of using the graphic directly.

As a domain owner MSN provide you with a limited view of who is using your domain, you can see how many people have signed up along with their user name and actual name (assuming they typed one in at signup). You can delete accounts through the management interface, but you obviously have no access to the users actual mailbox.

For a small business, a small government, a school or just somebody wanting to offer mail to family members it could not be easier.

That is pretty much it.

In recent years one of the more entertaining parts of working for Microsoft has been watching some of the innovation coming out of Microsoft Research.

On the wires today is news of a beta release of the Worldwide Telescope project.

The tool brings together a combination of images, looking up at the sky and down at the ground - stare into the stars, or reverse the angle and zoom into your street or home town instead.

The full press release can be found here;

The service goes well beyond the simple browsing of images. Users can choose which telescope they want to look through, including the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Spitzer Space Telescope or others. They can view the locations of planets in the night sky — in the past, present or future. They can view the universe through different wavelengths of light to reveal hidden structures in other parts of the galaxy. Taken as a whole, the application provides a top-to-bottom view of the science of astronomy.

“Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago,” said Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “I believe this new creation from Microsoft will have a profound impact on the way we view the universe.”

My wife’s grandfather was an astronomer and scientist by the name of Kenneth Franklin who among other things is co-credited with discovering that Jupiter emitted radio waves. These were the first detected radio signals from another planet.

I only got the chance to meet him twice, but I’m pretty confident he would have liked this project!

Cast your mind back to last November and you may remember Microsoft committing to working with the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium to produce a translator to their DAISY XML file format (translating WordprocessingML to Daisy DTBooks format), this allows anybody with OpenXML files to convert them for use with a wide array of assistive technologies.

I’m pleased to say that as of today the translator is available, and will run either in the shell in Windows (right click to translate, just like the ODF translator) or will integrate well with Microsoft Office.

From the Microsoft press release;

Microsoft Corp. today joined with industry and advocacy group leaders worldwide to launch new software that will make it easier for anyone to create documents and content that will be accessible for blind and print-disabled individuals. The new “Save as DAISY XML” add-in, designed for Microsoft Office Word 2007, Word 2003 and Word XP, will allow users to save Open XML-based text files into DAISY XML, the foundation of the globally accepted DAISY standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content (www.daisy.org).

It is also worth noting that the code for the translator is up on SourceForge if anybody wants to go take a look for themselves, again from the press release; 

The “Save as DAISY XML” add-in was created through an open source project with Microsoft, Sonata Software Ltd. and the Digital Accessible Information SYstem (DAISY) Consortium and can be downloaded by Microsoft Office Word users for free at http://www.openxmlcommunity.org/daisy.

The open source nature of the Open XML to DAISY XML translation project enables technologists to utilize the source code and other resources for their own applications. As Open XML adoption continues to expand across the software industry for use on various platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS and the Palm OS, solution providers interested in creating their own Open XML to DAISY XML translators can reference information available through the SourceForge open source project site at http://sourceforge.net/projects/openxml-daisy.

Almost a week ago now Alex Brown posted the details of his “smoke test” looking at an ODF document produced by OpenOffice 2.4.0, checking conformance with IS26300 with the ODF 1.0 RelaxNG schemas, using Jing.

For most of last week nobody really seemed to care, there were a couple of press stories but nothing like the coverage of his similar test with an IS29500 schema and document produced by Microsoft Office a week earlier.

Then a couple of days ago IBM’s Rob Weir jumped in with an extremely long post that he titled “ODF Validation for Dummies“. I’ll let you read the details for yourself, while I’m interested in the detail I’m more concerned by the tone of the overall post itself - I’ll come to that further down in this text.

For flavour, here is the opening line from Rob’s post;

Alex Brown has a problem. He can’t figure out how to validate ODF documents.

As you might expect, Dr. Brown felt the need to respond to this comment and posted a similarly long post of his own, digging deeper into his objectives, his findings and his intent.

Alex’s post, titled “ODF validation for the cognoscenti” responds to several parts of Rob’s monologue, as I read through it a part headed “Negativity” caught my eye;

Amid the general downer that is Rob’s blog entry, is an assumption that I share such negative thoughts. I find myself described as “someone who would be well served if he could show that all consortia standards are junk, and that only SC34 (and he himself) could make them good”. Hmmmmm - where did that come from?

For the record, I am an enthusiastic supporter of consortia and consortium standards and know from experience that consortia contain great people who are producing some of the best standards work in the planet: XML 1.0, ODF, XSLT, UBL, OOXML (ha!) – the list goes on. Most recently I was very pleased to see a new working draft of the important new W3C XProc specification – something that SC 34 is specifically deferring to rather than attempt something similar itself. I thoroughly disapprove of the kind of oppositional mindset that sees things in a polarised “ISO vs OASIS” or “ISO vs W3C” way. In my view that mode of thinking already did enough damage during the DIS 29500 project.

Rob’s response - a hand crafted piece of XML that will validate as an IS26300 document.

Well, Yahoo! (am I allowed to use that word?)

So here is my concern.

There are literally over a billion users of office suites in the world today. These users are self selecting their favourite office suite, and at the same time choosing whatever document format is right for them.

While the debate around document formats has been an interesting one for those of us embroiled in it we have to remember that these users are the reason why we’re having the conversations, not because we have nothing else to do other than bicker with one another.

It is fascinating to watch the back and forth ping pong on blogs as points are scored, but the mentality of directly attacking an individual with the goal of proving that you’re right (regardless of the facts) really does not help anybody.

At this point it feels like we are still a long way from a scenario where somebody from the OASIS TC might reach out to Alex or another member of JTC1/SC34 to discuss the challenges that arose during Alex’s simple test, instead the goal seems to be to prove something in the blogosphere. (I’m not sure what)

Common goals around interoperability, long term sustainability of documents and simplicity for users are often articulated by all parties - but if we’re going to achieve any of those goals then the blog based fun has to end, and professional dialogue has to begin.

I’m generally pretty easy going, there isn’t much that annoys me in life, but like most people I have a couple of unexplainable pet peeves.

This week has involved a series of meetings in Berkeley, CA and the hotel that I’ve been staying in has spent the week doing one of those annoying things.

If you stay in pretty much any hotel today and you will find that they are making some token gestures towards environmental sustainability, usually you’ll find a card that needs to be put on the bed if you want the sheets changed and instructions in the bathroom suggesting that you hang up your towels in the morning and use them again.

I’m a big supporter of every small step that any organization takes in this regard, and the idea of hotels using a little less detergent or energy on a daily basis is a very good thing in my opinion.

At the same time though many hotels have not quite got their complete environmental sustainability agenda worked out.

A small (but frustrating to me) example in many hotels is the newspaper that sits on the floor outside of my room when I wake up in the morning, I never read it and I doubt many other guests read it either. Most of them probably pile up in a corner of the room until the day the guest checks out then they get thrown out.

Whenever this happens I’ll generally stop by the front desk and ask the hotel to stop delivering the daily paper… this place though, like a number of other hotels I’ve stayed in this year, agreed not to then when I opened the door the following morning there is ANOTHER newspaper sitting there.

If you’re staying in a hotel anywhere in the world then I’d ask that you join me in raising this with the management when it happens, we should push hotels to move forwards and complete the agenda of environmental sustainability that they have started with the linens in your room, but don’t yet seem to have worked out in other parts of their business.