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The battle is no longer being fought at the file level. It's being fought at the network level.
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May 17, 2006
The Future of Lock-in.
If I seem dismissive about ODF and Microsoft Office generally, it's because I am. Over the past 2-3 years I've watched Microsoft build a new, growing bastion of lock-in.
The battle is no longer being fought at the file level. It's being fought at the network level.
The network of files, that is, within an organization. People in the open source world make a fetish out of defeating .doc, .xls, and .ppt with .odf. Fine. But in Microsoft's new world, even ODF documents would be locked into its network. Of which network am I speaking?
SharePoint.
I first encountered SharePoint at Novell, where Microsoft was using it to nudge Linux out of organizations. See, SharePoint is insidious. The basic version of it (Services) comes free with every Windows 2003 server. It costs departments nothing to deploy it. Given a taste (it's a decent, though not great product), a significant number upgrade to SharePoint Portal, start storing their content in this SharePoint repository, and kiss their freedom goodbye.
This is the same for any proprietary content repository. Documentum, Vignette, etc. have been locking in customers for years with their respective repositories. But Microsoft is more dangerous, because SharePoint is integrated with Office, Windows, SQL Server, and every other Microsoft product. Once you get a taste for SharePoint you have to keep buying more and more Microsoft product to leverage it, and the more content you store in the repository, the less likely you will ever get it out.
You're locked in.
This is one reason that companies should be extremely wary about using SharePoint, in particular. It is your content, not Microsoft's. If you want to keep it yours, you need to keep it in a secure but open place.
There are a range of great open source repositories out there (Alfresco (Truth in advertising - I work for Alfresco), Apache's Jackrabbit, Plone, etc.). This is where you want your content stored, because each of these offers easy ways to get the content in and, more importantly, out.
So, yes, I am a bit blase about file formats. That is yesterday's battle - an important one, but an old one. Today's battle is being fought in the network of files. You may not realize it now - though companies like Novell are already waging a fierce battle on this front - but you will. Get your data/content out now. Full Story |
