I once asked a corporate IT person what his company’s investment was in office software. He gave me the cost of their Microsoft Office licences – which was the wrong answer. Anyone can go out any buy the same licences – they aren’t an investment – they don’t create any competitive advantage; they’re just a cost of doing business (and a completely avoidable cost as OpenOffice.org is a free alternative). The company’s real investment – their intellectual property – is in the millions of documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, etc. they have created.

Software vendors have tried on and off to lock these documents so users needed the original software to use them. This can go horribly wrong, as some users of Microsoft Office 2003 have just found out to their cost, when the software refused to let them get at their documents – their own intellectual property. This is a design feature of Microsoft Office software which happened to misfire.

What it highlights is that no-one outside Microsoft has a clue what is hidden inside their secretive software. It also highlights the importance of not using a secret format to store valuable office documents. The safe way to store valuable documents is in OpenDocument Format (ODF) – an ISO approved open standard which isn’t owned by any one company. It’s the best guarantee against being held to ransom one day by a software supplier.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 12:44 pm and is filed under OpenDocument, OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.