IBM and OpenOffice
Great to see IBM finally step up and join the OpenOffice project. Of course, there are still some issues to attend to around organization and community to ensure the long-term health and viability of the project.
In related news, we have someone over on zdnet asking:
IBM to give OpenOffice the Outlook e-mail killer it needs?
Oh god, please no. This is exactly the kind of “follow Microsoft over the cliff” thinking that kills the possibility for real alternatives. My university has just implemented what I consider a disasterously poor decision to move to Exchange. I have yet to hear a single person express happiness about this move. The kind of integration that its promoters promised, of course, really only works if everyone uses a Microsoft stack: Windows, Office, and Outlook. I and many others simply won’t do that, and it turns out that the mail server works rather inconsistently with IMAP clients such as Apple Mail. The promised wonder system is, in my experience, a decided step backwards, and it is so precisely because of its monolithic integrated design.
No, the solution is open, decoupled systems; disparate services and applications tied together though open standards (think efforts like CalDav). OpenOffice does not need yet more integrated functionality; it needs to be stripped down. OOo will not have much of a future unless its developers look forward and ask how personal computing and productivity might look different in the internet age.
