Twenty-first century media
There seems to be a faint aura of surprise in two stories today, one about Cablevision's purchase of the New York newspaper Newsday, and about the launch of a high-end quarterly newsmagazine called Dispatches.
The first story seemed motivated to ask why a newspaper should command such a high sales price ($650-million) in an era when the obvious shift is to online news, and second story, about a new magazine called Dispatches, reports wonderingly that it's being founded on the notion that people want to read news analysis on paper and don't mind getting it just four times a year.
Perhaps there is something to be learned here: that contrary to popular opinion, print media are not dead, dead, dead.
The story on the purchase of Long-Island-based Newsday concluded that newspapers will continue to be sold, although at lower prices. The sales will be driven by strategic needs, the story explained, with buyers offering lower and lower prices.
This is a logical conclusion considering the valuation of recent sales. About two years ago, newspapers were being sold at 10 to 12 times their cash flow; today, it's down to about 6.5 to 7 times their cash flow.
That conclusion supports the existence of rival bids made by News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch and tabloid rival Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the New York Daily News. Murdoch and Zuckerman wanted their advertisers to reach affluent Long Islanders, and they wanted to do that by combining Newsday with their own New York properties, and the costs could be rationalized into profitability.
The founders of Dispatches, journalist and author Mort Rosenblum and photographer Gary Knight, say they're trying to slow down the breathless delivery of news that characterizes the Internet-based news providers. “We just thought we would go deeper and, when possible, closer, and deal with not so much the what and who, but the why and what can be done,” said Rosenblum, a former AP reporter.
There is something encouraging in both these situations. Conventional wisdom usually says the new ventures are mad, because the trend is against print.
But conventional wisdom is sometimes capable of a major error. Take a news-reporting trend over the past four years, say, and project it forward by another bunch of years and it will be relentelessly headed for the great newspaper graveyard. What the trend-watchers sometimes forget to ask is whether there will be a bottoming out in this trend; it's easy to predict a steadily progressing trend, but much more difficult to predict when the trend will run into a brick wall.
And it will. Just like all the other alleged victims of technology found out. Television didn't kill movies, the recording industry didn't kill live concerts, and streaming video won't kill TV.
This is not rocket science. The arrival of new technology on the scale we're seeing now is definitely going to change older technologies, and newspapers will change profoundly, but they're not likely to disappear entirely, despite what online evangelists say.
Obviously, Cablevision sees some sort of future in a Long Island newspaper that is not based on rationalizing its costs with existing properties, and the two journalists behind Dispatches are gambling people will want a less-frenzied diet of news and analysis.
They're both probably right. But whether they will make their particular ventures work will be specific to their separate approaches, how deep their pockets are and how patient their shareholders are. Not on what so many people insist is an inevitable trend.
They may or may not succeed. But their individual fates are not likely to provide us many answers. Ultimately, the publications that survive will be the ones that make the fewest mistakes.
Programming in space and time
On a recent long-haul flight, I became mesmerized by the feature that shows your current position, flight path, altitude and time to destination on a TV screen. It reports air speed, and that it's colder than minus 52 degrees Fahrenheit outside, close to the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius meet.
This particular flight was from Sao Paulo to Miami, more than 10 hours of the sardine experience. The movies were dreadful and barely watchable on the poor-quality screens they put on the back of the seat, and unviewable when the fellow in the seat directly in front slams his seat-back to the maximum reclining angle. That puts the screen too close to watch and at the wrong angle.
About the only thing I could watch without strain was the screen that reports the flight progress.
I'm not sure how this is done, although I suspect it's based on a GPS system that's then fed through some software that positions a toy plane against a map.
What first puzzled me is the list of towns on the screen. The computer showed our progress in reference to Brazilian cities called Londrina, Uberlandia, Franca, Imperatriz, and Blumenau. Brazilians I know never mention these places. And there was nothing on the screen suggesting we were anywhere near Rio de Janeiro.
Other cities made notable included Iquitos and Iquique, the former being the largest city (400,000 people) in the Peruvian rain forest, the latter a smaller Chilean town of about a quarter-million souls. I suppose if I were programming the in-flight progress video, I'd toss them in too, just because it's so much fun to say them together.
Sometimes the view on the screen would show a very large chunk of the map, from Brazil to Florida and from the Pacific shore to West Africa. The only cities worth noting in that area turned out to be Austin (Texas), Freetown (Bahamas), Marrakesh (Morocco) and Dakar (Senegal), as well as Miami.
Who programs these things?
I checked Google to find out, and found no company that would admit to making this pre-millennium technology (I first saw it on a Qantas flight in 1995). Instead, I found companies offering very sophisticated in-flight passenger entertainment, involving streaming TV and movies, games, Web surfing, e-mail and gorgeous tracking screens. Some include Google Maps (JetBlue offers that), broadband connectivity, data and video download speeds of up to 8 megabits per second. Panasonic's iXplor In-Flight Tracking System is a moving map application that not only shows the flight's progress, but allows passengers to “explore the world right from their seats” using high-resolution satellite images.
That's the idea, all right, but what these companies are offering makes everything I've seen so far look as colourful as Pong did in 1972, without zoom levels, telephone, live-text news feeds, meal and drink ordering, touch-screen shopping or interactive games.
Perhaps it's because these systems cost a lot, and airlines are living in a hand-to-mouth business — and the hand is holding a cold and uninviting sandwich.
But such a system, with its flashy technology, certainly would go a long way to making me forget that I am, from an economic point of view, just another a sardine.
When the memory fails
Silicon.com, a British website dealing with technology in business, published the results of an informal poll the other day in which it asked respondents how many passwords they use at the office.
The result, Workers hit by password overload, is no big surprise. We've all known for some time that we have too many passwords.
Silicon.com reported that a scant 2 per cent of their respondents were lucky enough to have only one; 61 per cent have more than five different passwords. But a fifth of respondents have as many as 20 passwords to juggle.
Interestingly, Silicon.com's survey asked only about office applications. It did not ask for passwords to recreational websites, banking websites, music sites, news sites, and others that respondents might use through their home computers. By the time they're finished, people might have as many as 50 passwords.
This, of course, is insane. People can use password-keeping applications like Roboform, from Siber Systems, a great program that stores all your passwords under one master password. But crack that one password and, if you have access to that computer, you can have all the other passwords at your fingertips. So of course you should change your Roboform password frequently to secure yourself.
It's bad enough to have so many passwords, but office applications are also often outfitted with password sunset features, which kick you off the system after a set period of time and force you to come up with a new password. Not only do they demand complexity (the new password must have at least one upper-case letter, at least two numbers and be at least six or eight characters long), these sunset features can include algorithms that examine your new password and reject it if it's too similar to any of the passwords you used in the past.
In the real world, there is little difference between having 20 passwords or one that you have to change 20 times. There are only so many passwords one can keep in one's head while changing a number of them every two or three months, so many people resort to writing them down. And that makes their computers even more vulnerable.
I asked an IT guy once about why his department keeps demanding workers change their passwords, and he gave me a blank look, as if to say that if I can't keep up with all the password changes the company demands, then that's my problem.
I pressed him further, and he said that the system is in place to protect the IT department from corporate wrath should management decide to look for a scapegoat after a case involving a stolen password.
This is backward. We're making passwords difficult not to secure the computer, but to protect the IT guys who are running the computer system.
Surely there's a better way. Perhaps a portable flash drive with passwords on it, or a portable finger-print reader with all the appropriate passwords recorded in it, although I can see problems with those systems too. I'm also sure a lot of people have their own idiosyncratic ways of keeping track.
Many office workers would love to install Roboform or something similar, but they can't — their computers are, more often than not, locked down because the company doesn't want employees installing any old software that could com promise the office network.
And we do that to make sure we don't leave the nice guys in the IT department vulnerable.
Online, people now know which dog you are
Fans of irony must have loved reading the story Facebook? LinkedIn? Leave 'em to the riffraff. It reported people who see themselves as elite are leaving Facebook and LinkedIn to ordinary mortals and are “now looking for a comfortable place to mingle with like-minded people.”
Milton Pedraza, CEO of The New York-based Luxury Institute, a research company specializing on individuals with a high net worth, was quoted as saying that the “elite,” which he equates with “wealthy consumers,” have been reluctant to start using networking sites. Apparently what separates a person described as elite from the “average Joe” is a greater concern about privacy issues. A second difference is that the elite have their own social-networking strategies, including international meetings, company get-togethers and private clubs, where entrance is restricted to people of certain social or educational classes.
This is not to say that social-networking sites do not appeal to them; far from it. In fact, an increasing number of elite people love the idea of online social networking but have a lot more to lose to the kind of shenanigans designed to victimize lesser mortals. They're always prepared to pay good money to have someone filter their contacts with people for whom they have little time or use, and be able to feel comfortable without the great unwashed wasting their time.
It's not just about wealth; it's not as important as the ability to “be interesting and bring something to the table,” says Arya Marafie, owner of DiamondLounge.com, which has all of 150 members and has been shifting its emphasis from business networking to dating and fun. Unlike the open-door policies of Facebook and MySpace, DiamondLounge.com wants a slow and controlled growth, mainly because Marafie isn't relying on fast growth to attract the advertisers to ensure success over the long run.
Moreover, people are beginning to see LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace as a free-for-all. One way to get rid of that is by paying a fee, which weeds out the ones who don't belong.
Hey, this wasn't supposed to happen.
It violates the conventional notion of the socializing nature of the Internet, going back to that old New Yorker cartoon of two dogs on a computer, with one saying to another, “Online, no one knows you're a dog.”
It has been a meme among many social cyber-evangelists that the Internet will become a “democratizing force” that would erase the differences not only between corporate entities but also people. It was always a naïve concept, perhaps because in the early days of the Internet most people that inhabited cyberspace shared so much and couldn't conceive of any other people in the world. But it was so firmly entrenched that anyone who demurred and tried to point out the obvious — that all societies eventually break up into social strata — would be jeered for being a curmudgeon by, of all people, the very “riffraff” that the elite are now paying good money to avoid.
Gays, lesbians and blogs
I am nonplussed by a survey taken by Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs Communications, which reported Monday that gays and lesbians read blogs more often than heterosexuals.
The study, using a statistically c redible sample of 2,733 U.S. adults, said that 51 per cent of gays and lesbians who use the Internet regularly read blogs, compared to just 36 per cent of heterosexuals.
This was shored up with similar results in more detailed questions: 27 per cent of gay and lesbian Web users posted a comment on a blog in the past month, in contrast with 13 per cent of heterosexuals; 21 per cent said they contributed to their own blogs over the previous month, while only 7 per cent of their straight counterparts did.
It wouldn't have occurred to me to divide blog readers this way, but then I'm not a marketer; I began to realize this survey is important for marketers because of the significant discrepancy in the behaviour of straight and gay people on the Web. If advertisers are trying to reach gays and lesbians, this survey tells them unequivocally they should look at blogs — almost 20 per cent of gays and lesbians reported feeling more “positive” about ads on blogs as opposed to 8 per cent of heterosexual adults.
Wes Combs, president of Witeck-Combs Communications, said in a statement released Monday that “studies consistently show that gays and lesbians are leaders in online usage, are very keen to find relevant and timely information, and feel more strongly about staying on top of latest trends.”
“Blogs are fast shaping the media landscape, and it is one medium that marketers and advertisers can't afford to ignore,” he said, “especially when it comes to reaching gay and lesbian influencers, voters and consumers.”
My initial response was to wonder whether there is any significant reason for gays and lesbians to outnumber straight blog readers; perhaps there is a gender-specific subject that appeals to gays and lesbians, in the way that tech blogs appeal to a largely straight male audience.
But the study suggests no special blog subject is responsible, just blogs in general. Gays and lesbians dominate pretty consistently across all subjects: 28 per cent of gay respondents read news and current-events blogs (compared to 19 per cent of heterosexuals), 26 per cent read entertainment and pop-culture blogs (11 per cent of straight people) and 23 per cent follow political blogs (14 per cent of straight people).
The pattern of behaviour spills over into other online activities, such as instant-messaging, with 25 per cent of gay adult men saying they send instant messages at least once a day, compared with 15 per cent of heterosexual adult men.
I won't dare speculate on the reasons for all this, except to say I am intrigued by it.
I can't wait to be enlightened.
Roaming in Copacabana
I walked into a Rogers Wireless store the other day as a customer, and was blown away by the honesty of one sales clerk. To do that, he said one word: “Revenue.”
Let me back up. I had just returned from a holiday in Brazil, where I had brought my Blackberry so I could stay in contact with family and friends in a cheaper fashion than with a cellphone or with a hotel's exorbitant telephone service charges. Which is why I didn't shut down my e-mail accounts before I went.
When I came back, I got a bill from Rogers, covering the data charges I incurred over about half of the time I spent in Rio (I'll get a bill for the other half later).
The damages: 5,151 kilobytes — about 5 megabytes — for a total of $241.11. I expect it to double when the next bill comes, adding up to about two days in a four-star hotel room with an all-you-can-eat breakfast of pastries and tropical fruits. This is the real measure of how Canadians pay the highest data rates in the world: Just under $50 per megabyte.
I've learned my lesson: Don't incur roaming charges. Don't stay in touch. Forget productivity. Forget the convenience promised by modern technology. Don't even think of working while abroad. Just suffer, and let your company, family and friends suffer. Rogers' shareholder demands trump anything you might want to use your cellphone for.
It was my fault, of course. I knew Canadians pay the world's highest data rates, but I had no idea how much I was incurring while on the road.
So I went to a Rogers store and asked the sales clerk how I could have calculated the charges as they occurred. I expected there to be some website that could tell me what I routinely learn from taxi cabs: a real-time fare update. So where do I look?
I can't do it, I was told by the sales clerk. It's not possible.
Why not?
“Because Rogers tells all of its cellphone manufacturers to disable that feature in our cellphones,” he said in a manner that suggested I was the last person to learn this. Perhaps I was.
And why does Rogers do that?
That's when he dropped the one-word bomb: “Revenue.”
Talk about honesty.
So Rogers won't keep a running tally of my roaming data charges because it consciously made a decision not to tell me; if I knew, I might cut back on my use of e-mail or using that neat WorldMate Live application that tells me if my flight is on time, what I can expect in terms of weather and what the currency exchange rate is.
I was hit with this bill coincidentally with Rogers's news that it would be releasing the Apple iPhone some time later this year, which is relevant because the iPhone is a notoriously heavy user of data traffic. Catherine McLean's story in the Globe and Mail pointedly mentioned that Rogers was looking at the iPhone as its “next moneymaker” and that users will probably have to pay a minimum of $80 a month for the iPhone instead of the $72.39 average for other cellphones. And that's just in Canada — if you're a real glutton for punishment or have money to burn, get an iPhone and schlep it with you when you travel.
Unless of course you don't care because your company is picking up your roaming tab and not complaining about it. And that brings up yet another question: If corporations are really interested in efficiencies as they say they are, why aren't they complaining?
“Speculation about the delay [in releasing the iPhone] includes the possibility that Rogers may be less than keen on changing its data rate plans as other carriers have done,” Catherine Mclean wrote. She went on to note that Rogers “reported that monthly bills for cellphone subscribers on contracts jumped $4.75 to $72.39 due to greater data service demand.”
Well, I'm really happy for Rogers' shareholders. But I can't say I'm a very happy customer.
The inconvenience banking card
Kapica's first law of computing has always been that error messages are, in themselves, always wrong.
On the third day of a recent holiday in Brazil, I was once again struck by how downright mendacious they can be. My wife went to four automatic tellers in Rio trying to get some cash — one learns never to carry much cash in Rio de Janeiro, so trips to the ATM are frequent.
None of the four would cough up anything, even though all four were on the Cirrus network, which allows for cash exchanges between different banks. The machines issued non-committal messages such as “Could not complete transfer,” “Connection failed,” and “Transaction not completed” (Brazilian ATMs speak several languages).
These error messages were all true in the broadest sense, but didn't tell us anything we didn't already know: My wife was not going to get any cash.
There, on the front of her card, were the words “Convenience Card” printed in large letters. On the back, it had an 800 phone number in case of problems. But 800 numbers do not work from Brazil, so she took a deep breath and telephoned directly to the banking centre, which had a Nova Scotia area code. After some lengthy explanations, the call was then shunted to someone whose accent suggested Bangalore instead of Halifax.
Everything proceeded nicely and politely; my wife's card had been frozen by the bank because someone had apparently stolen her identity and tried to use the card in fraud attempts in Montreal and Quebec City. We were impressed that the bank (CIBC) had caught it so easily.
No problem, said the help-desk gentleman, just pop by your local branch and sign an affidavit, and everything will be corrected.
Well, it's a little difficult to “pop by” your home branch when you're in Rio.
Now this was merely an annoyance, because I had my own card, and it still worked. But we had to know why my wife's card didn't work in case there was a big problem that needed immediate attention.
By design, ATM makers do not program their machines to be explicit, saying such things as “Your card has been frozen because of a fraud attempt, please call for help.” But surely they could include something a little more explanatory than “Transaction not completed.”
The bottom line was that the telephone call, not including the hotel's extortionate long-distance surcharges, cost us $124.
And when I see the word “Convenience” on a bank card, I do not automatically think of spending $124 as a convenience.
Like too many semantically challenged technologies, ATM people obviously consider “convenience” to mean something different than it does to me.
Awesomely boring, meet awesomely worried
I couldn't agree more with my colleague Mathew Ingram in his blog today about the London-based Society of Authors who are worried about book piracy on the Internet, which “will ultimately drive authors to stop writing unless radical methods are devised to compensate them for lost sales.”
I admire Mathew's restraint. I wouldn't have been able to contain myself repeating Society of Authors chairwoman Tracy Chevalier, who said that when books go on the Internet, “for a while it will be great for readers because they will pay less and less but in the long run it's going to ruin the information. People will stop writing. There's a lot of ‘wait and see what the technology brings' but the trouble is if you wait and see too long then it's gone. That's what happened to the music industry.”
I spent many years working with the books industry and I found it to be one of the most conservative bunch of people I'd ever worked with. No, not politically (they were cutting-edge liberals on that count), but in terms of habit.
I began to realize this when some literary agents I knew in the early 1980s urged their clients not to submit manuscripts produced by dot-matrix printers. It gives the impression, they said, that the author didn't write the book, but that a computer did.
This was before people started sending long manuscripts by modem. I did that in 1984 with the manuscript of my own book, when I shipped it out via a Radio Shack modem to the Coach House Press, which was printing the book for the since-vanished publisher Lester & Orpen Dennys. It took all night, about eight hours or so, to push it over at 300 bits per second.
I now know I wasn't the first, but no one else I knew then had tried it.
For quite a few years after that, the book-printing industry stuck to a formula based on hot-metal technology when it charged publishers for revisions: After a certain number of editorial changes to a manuscript, publishers would be charged extra, because the typesetters were forced to recast the rest of each paragraph affected. Never mind that computer typesetting had eliminated that need entirely.
That's the kind of conservatism I'm talking about.
It was a time when a lot of writers still stuck adamantly to their typewriters or pencils. Now I don't begrudge them this point — few writers could afford a computer at 1980s prices, and besides, they were comfortable with the tools they had. But at some point, the use of typewriters became a badge of rebellion among writers, a rage against the machine, which began to pale only after Greg Gatenby, who founded the Harbourfront Reading Series, started giving away Wang word processors, and later Xerox computers, as awards in his Authors Festival.
What the British Society of Authors seems to be missing in its fear of the Internet is the difficulty of getting a book converted to a digital document. Unless the author or publisher releases the digital text, a pirate must scan each page individually. Recently, Plustek, a manufacturer of scanners, released the OpticBook 3600, manufactured specifically to scan books. Its secret? Along one edge, the scanner had a sharp corner that allowed the user to lay the page flat, and not have it curve into the spine, producing a distorted image.
But scanning is merely the first step in the process. You then have to convert the image to text through an optical character reader, and check it for accuracy, which means going over the entire book like a proofreader.
I did some research among the darker denizens of the Internet, and discovered that book piracy is not very popular simply because of the effort required to scan books. One putative pirate put it succinctly: “It's awesomely boring,” he said.
Ripping a single song as an MP3 can be a three-minute affair, and requires no proof-reading. Ripping a whole book requires days of patient, repetitive and mind-numbing work, which is antithetical to the piratical culture of the Internet. The premise of Internet piracy is simplicity and speed. As a result, about the only book worth doing this for would be something as big as the Harry Potter books — and even that case was a matter of someone photographing each page instead of running it through an optical-character reader; the only purpose seemed to be that the pirate wanted to score Brownie points for having it before anyone else did.
Surely the Society of Authors has not taken this into account. Instead of writers giving up writing, as Chevalier fears, it will more likely be the pirates not pirating books (if books were to be pirated on a massive scale, it would have happened already). This state of affairs will continue until someone comes out with better hardware that will automate the scanning, character reading and proofing process. And I can't see that happening for a long time.
Besides, and I'm sorry to say this, the literary world's works just aren't important enough or profitable enough for miscreants to plunder. When the Society of Authors expresses its fear of the Internet, it's really just trying to assert that books matter. Of course books matter — but just not to pirates on the Internet.
Cellphones and the curse of multi-tasking
The saddest line in Karen Howlett's story this morning about Quebec and Nova Scotia banning cellphone talk while driving was uttered by Alberta Transportation spokesman Jerry Bellikka, who said that when a practice is outlawed, people pay attention at first but then revert to their old habits.
The debate about passing anti-cellphone laws for drivers rather misses the point, I think. It's not a matter of whether a law is needed to stop drivers from conducting business while on the road, but brains.
Driving while on a cellphone has become the flashpoint of an issue brought upon us by all technologies that have pressed upon us the ability — even the desirability — to multi-task. Everything from the behaviour of central processor chips to multiple downloads from the Internet to multiple recordings of TV shows at the same time suggest that doing several things at once is a natural way to live.
Employers tend to like that language, if only because it suggests that multitasking is a good way to squeeze more work out of fewer employees. But ask managers whether they would prefer an employee who gave full attention to the task at hand or someone who can dash off a bunch of things at once, and you know what the answer will be.
The problem is that this is where the thinking stops. We do not seem to have embraced technology to the point that we can see how its misuse might be counter-productive. Even disastrously so.
In a technological world, parts of our brains are busy at any one time working on other tasks. One part is offically dedicated to the primary task at hand, but we still check our e-mail, keep up with our pals on Facebook and tap away on keyboards while on the phone, which is an undertsandable affront to the person on the other end of the line. A small part of the brain is vaguely aware of our surroundings and a tiny part complains that we're just not paying as much attention as we should.
But we squelch the last two thoughts as soon as they arise. We can't believe that we're not capable of performing a job perfectly well while doing something else. It's a matter of ego — “Hell yes, I can do both with no problem.” Besides, all those positive-thinking self-improvement programs are built on the notion that we can do anything if we simply apply enough willpower to it.
We're kidding ourselves.
I'm sure that most drivers have cursed as other cellphone-distracted drivers start behaving erratically. And this is not just about driving: I've seen pedestrians so distracted by their conversations that they blunder into the path of other pedestrians, unaware they have violated those gossamer but important rules governing social behaviour. Or by those people who drive bus passengers crazy with the details of a conversation that would have been much quieter had the conversation been between seat-mates.
We pride ourselves on our common sense, but we live in what I call an explicit society — if there isn't a law specifically stating you can't so something, then we're allowed to do it. Never mind what we know as being right or wrong.
Driving while on the cellphone should be an implicit thing. We should understand that using the cellphone while driving is as patently dangerous as putting on makeup or eating hamburgers behind the wheel. And just because we've done distracting things behind the wheel without dire results, it doesn't mean we're not tempting fate.
Despite the ever-louder drum roll of complaints about people who will not accept that cellphones can distract drivers, it's clear that they won't stop road-bound conversations.
Sadly, then, all provinces might just have to pass such a law.
Playing by Microsoft's rules
Few people will even begin to understand today's announcement that the International Standards Organization has approved the software giant's application to have its Office Open XML text and spreadsheet format certified as a global industry standard. After all, OOXML is an off-putting acronym, and most people will have little need to worry about it because so many of us use Microsoft Office that its acceptance as a standard won't affect us much, at least directly.
Microsoft has been pushing hard for international ratification of OOXML, a version of the default file-saving format of Microsoft Office 2007, becauser officially it wants to improve its chances of winning government contracts and to attract more developers working on new software applications and content.
The word “open” usually has warm and fuzzy connotations for the tech community, suggesting a selfless drive to advance technology without placing the profit motive first. An open standard means everyone can build on it without fear of being sued into oblivion by a very large and litigious corporation. Not unlike Microsoft, for instance.
But not this time. Microsoft has met opponents to its bid to get OOXML certified, and those people argue that the Open Document Format, which was developed by a consortium led by Sun Microsystems and certified by the ISO, already is an open standard; introducing a new open standard would make both formats (OOXML and ODF) mutually exclusive. You can't have two ways of doing everything only one way.
Microsoft issued an Open Specification Promise that is supposed to protect projects from patent risk. But many tech companies have expressed doubts that the OSP would cover software development that is written under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL).
In fact, a legal group called the Software Freedom Law Centre pored over Microsoft's Open Specification Promise's definition of Covered Specifications, and concluded that the software giant offers no assurance to developers of open software that their work is protected from legal attack, and that it is “unsafe to rely upon the OSP for any free software implementation, whether under the GPL or another free software licence.”
The “Covered Specifications” states that “new versions of previously covered specifications will be separately considered for addition to the list.”
This, the SFLC believes, means that future versions of the specifications are not guaranteed to be covered under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise, and every time a something in the specification changes, Microsoft can revoke its promise because it applied only to previous versions of that same specification. In other words, Microsoft has reserved the right to withdraw from the standard-setting workgroup or activity.
So if developers work in the belief they are covered by Microsoft's promise, they could be wrong, because they will never know for sure that code they write based on the latest versions of the specifications would be safe from an intellectual-property suit.
This won't mean much to the average user, except to provide more proof that it's always dangerous to play by Microsoft's rules.
Jack Kapica has been writing on technology for the past 15 years for The Globe and Mail, and has been working exclusively for the on-line Globe since 2001. In his Cyberia blog, he writes news, makes comments, looks at rumours, and offers opinions on culture and developments in technology.
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