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 [...]

With a little persistence, I have persuaded the UK Prime Minister’s Office to accept an e-Petition:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to adopt the Hague Declaration of the Digital Standards Organisation.
If you are a British citizen or resident, please consider supporting this petition by voting online before 6th July.
In practical terms, the Hague Declaration [...]

News sources are starting to leak the news that Microsoft is about to announce support for Open Document Format (ODF) in MS-Office 2007, and will participate in the ongoing development of ODF through OASIS, the industry body for XML standards. This fairly arcane announcement has the potential to revolutionise the way we use office documents [...]

I’m always looking for opportunities to promote open source in general (and OpenOffice.org in particular) outwith the “FOSS ghetto”. The day job is not exactly a hotbed of open source (at our last corporate Technology Conference, Steve Balmer gave a video keynote about what a great customer we are). So when I noticed that [...]

When the OpenDocument Format (ODF) was promoted to ISO 2660, I gave two cheers – the final cheer was reserved for when Microsoft adopted the standard as the default file format for MS-Office. I also called for independent conformance testing for ODF, something the ODF community has not yet achieved.
So, Microsoft’s announcement today that it [...]

An interesting (if long) blog today by Andy Updegrove A Proposal to Recognize the Need for “Civil ICT Standards”. This week’s discussions in Geneva about Microsoft’s request to ISO to approve a second standard for office documents has generated more heat than light in the technical press. Andy takes a philosophical spin on the issue [...]

BECTA, the UK government’s education technology agency, has today made a complaint to the UK Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for alleged anti-competitive practices by Microsoft. BECTA has two bones to pick with Microsoft:

Microsoft offers cut-price software licences for UK schools, but insists that schools must buy Microsoft licences for every PC in the school [...]