It's official — IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org project. [There's good reporting and analysis from Andy Updegrove and Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady. Update (12 Sep): Here's Andy's interview with IBM's Doug Heintzman, Director of Strategy for the Lotus division.]
Here's the back of the envelop analysis.
From the OpenOffice.org community perspective, I'm guessing Louis Suarez-Potts (OO.o Community Manager) is feeling good to get a new injection of code/energy. This is great for the community. The OpenOffice suite keeps getting better and better, but new blood with new code could provide a much needed boost.
Overall Sun Microsystems is probably [very] happy IBM is supporting OpenOffice.org directly. This is a much better situation than IBM building some form of ODF development platform inside Eclipse.org to enable ODF over OOXML, with OpenOffice.org hit as collateral damage. [This would be sort of ironic since Eclipse helped to pull the Java centre-of-gravity away from Sun, and Visual Studio was collateral damage (or icing depending upon one's perspective).] Collaboration is the much stronger market play here for Sun and IBM, and most importantly OO.o users and customers.
From the IBM perspective, this is brilliant business as usual. ODF is the global leverage they need to crack open the Microsoft Office marketplace. (I've written ad nauseam that ODF and Microsoft Office is just another example of Christensen economics in motion. Microsoft has over-delivered on Office. They mistakenly think more innovation faster is the answer. Let the chips fall where they may.) IBM will likely use OpenOffice to front-end Lotus and the Domino server product lines, and anchor their business messages to their customers's needs around standards and open source software, much the same as they do with Eclipse and the Websphere developer world. Their claims are that much stronger with this announcement.
Sun gave Gnome a huge leg up about four years ago when they contributed a wealth of their accessibility technology R+D. IBM will now contribute the same into OpenOffice.org. It means they can easily manage their way through U.S. government procurement regulation in this space. Once again brilliant IP management from IBM, and good for OO.o users and customers. [For those that have heard me present, this is exactly what I mean about having a mature intellectual asset strategy, and being generous exactly in order to play to win.]
A strengthened OpenOffice.org will help Novell immeasurably to keep their distance with Microsoft on the desktop. Novell has done a lot of work with OO.o in the past. They have a great desktop Linux product. They can simply take a ride on this one and eat the benefits. There's really nothing Microsoft can say here. Regardless of any agreements around OOXML that Novell may have with Microsoft, Novell comes out clean on the ODF front as customers demand it.
I noticed the press release includes a quote from Beijing's Redflag Chinese 2000 Software Co., Ltd., the makers of Redflag Linux and RedOffice. This is significant. Apparently last November I was one of the first people to blog about the document format work in China that led to a Chinese national standard (UOF). Redflag Chinese 2000 was implementing UOF in Red Office (the Chinese packaging of OO.o). There is work afoot to harmonize ODF and UOF. And clearly Redflag Chinese 2000 remains committed to the OO.o effort.
So despite the bluff and bluster, the OOXML camp inside Microsoft should not be sleeping well at this point.
"Don't blink. Blink and you're dead. Don't turn your back. Don't look away. And don't blink. Good luck!" — the Doctor
I have some thoughts on the timing of the IBM / openoffice.org announcement. I hear the official reasons why IBM is now joining openoffice.org, but I'm not sure I'm convinced that's all there was to the decision.
We know that IBM's decision was influenced by the ISO vote results on OOXML.
I suspect that prior to that vote, IBM was playing things close-to-the-vest for the following reasons:
1. Old rivalries with Sun over Eclipse/Java could be spun by MS as negative.
2. Openly participating in openoffice.org would preclude options for IBM to partner with Microsoft (had the vote gone otherwise or the objections been less substantial) in the future to make OOXML-compliant apps without losing their support-base in the FOSS community - a possible lose-everything scenario for IBM.
3. Now that the vote is known, Microsoft has come out and said that if ECMA/ISO takes OOXML to true standards & interoperability that Microsoft will abandon the OOXML standard. This leaves IBM with a high probability that OOXML compliance will *not* equal Office 2007 compatability and that Office 2007 will likely be forevermore proprietary and closed to all Microsoft partners & competitors.
4. IBM has already been - and continues to be - accused by Microsoft of lobbying and conspiring against Microsoft to subvert the ISO voting process against Microsoft to the detriment of OOXML and to the benefit of ODF. This bodes ill for Microsoft's willingness/ability to turn their FUD-machine around and announce a partnership with IBM to build products that are either based on or that interoperate with either OOXML or Office 2007.
IBM may or may not have been active in spreading the word about known shortcomings in the OOXML spec to various countries. If so, I consider that action to be fair given the size of the spec that Microsoft dumped into the fast-track process and the number of flaws that were able to be identified in the few months available to the NBs. This is in addition to the questionable practices that were eventually made public concerning Microsoft's various 'lobbying' efforts.
IBM may have developed reservations about partnering with Microsoft as a direct result of this political manuevering and of the potential legal fallout from Microsoft's known vote-influencing (I would use stronger language, but 'vote-influencing' is being kind and gives Microsoft more credit than I think they deserve).
Given that IBM has also been working toward ODF standardization as means to enhance their 'standards-compliance' posture with governments around the world, it now makes a lot of sense to finally get off the fence between the potential that Office 2007 will dominate the office market as the successor to Office 2003 and the potential that ODF (with a bit of extra push at this point in time) might just be able to dislodge MSOffice from its public sector dominance and use ODF's public sector market penetration as a launch-pad into the private sector.
Dislodging Microsoft's hold on the office market would have the positive effect that IBM's piece of the resulting ODF pie would be much larger than IBM's piece of the current MSOffice-dominated pie. This would also allow for many new possibilities for IBM and others to implement service-oriented-architectures and software-as-a-service models that would create entirely new markets.
Finally there is the strong positive influence of all the goodwill this announcement will generate in the FOSS communities, not to mention the marketing advantages that IBM will gain by being seen to cooperate with both the letter of the FOSS licenses and their spirits as well, while also providing significant additional standards-based value for their customers.
I think the decision to join openoffice.org at this time makes a lot of sense for the above reasons and that contributing the accessibility technologies and the programmers to help implement those technologies provides both a substantial press announcement and a very positive counter-story to Microsoft's accusations of ISO vote-tampering.
Please do not misunderstand - I think IBM is doing a terrific thing by contributing their accessibility framework to the ODF community and I welcome their contributions. Accessibility is one of the primary 'weaknesses' in the openoffice.org product that Microsoft and their supporters keep harping on despite the fact that neither OOXML nor Office 2007 have any substantial support for disabled persons without massive additional expenditures to 3rd-party vendors of taxpayer dollars to acquire the needed accessibility aids for MSOffice products.
Posted by: anonymous | 13 September 2007 at 17:28