Published in Hindustan Times on 27th Feb, 2008

If you use recently upgraded software, you may have noticed that the world’s favourite word processing application, the Microsoft Office, now saves your document in .docx format. If you have been wondering what’s the extra “x” all about — that is the mark of the controversial Open XML format for electronic documents that Microsoft is trying to make the globally accepted standard through the International Standards Organisation (ISO).

This is a bit like cricket, where the pitch conditions matter for rival teams and alter the course of the game. The ISO is playing the groundsman.

The format game has pitted the biggest IT giants in a war. While Microsoft is on the one side, the Open Document Format (ODF) Alliance led by IBM-Sun Microsystems besides giants like Google, Oracle and many more are on the other side.

The battle has extended to India, where industry chambers like Assocham are among those taking sides. Thus far, both the Bureau of Industrial Standards (BIS) in India and ISO at the global level have not been in favour of Microsoft’s XML standard. So what is the big deal?

Importance of Standards

Standards help smooth manufacturing and services. Like GSM and CDMA standards in telephony and bottle sizes in soft drinks, standards are everywhere. In computer use, standards help maintain interoperability — documents formatted to common principles — much like language scripts or grammar — can be accessed and used between people and machines. Besides, they aid in innovation and also help bring about a common platform of sensibility.

“Standards help in ensuring that consumers are free from being caught up with one single application for word processing as it provides guaranteed inter-operability between applications. Moreover, since word processing is something that has strong network effects, it will automatically gravitate towards a single standard,” says Jajit Bhattacharya of Sun Microsystems.
The IBM-Sun alliance is pleading for a single standard for word processing — ODF.

Says Zaheda Bhorat, Open Source Programs Manager, Google, “Standards are important because people expect the products they use to just work. Standards help make sure that whether you’re playing a CD, calling family or friends on a different phone network, or opening a document, you’re able to do what you want to do.” IBM’s Ashish Gautam hits the nail on the head when he says, “When someone sends an electronic document to a friend, and it is saved in a proprietary-standard format, the recipient cannot easily open the file.”

Interoperability

Currently opening a .docx or any of the Open XML files can be a daunting task if you don’t have the latest version of Microsoft Office. Not only is it highly inconvenient, there is little support available for it outside of Microsoft’s system. In other words, when you create a document in Open XML, chances are that the other party may or may not be able to access it depending on various factors like availability of new plug-ins and the latest software. Microsoft clearly disputes this. Vijay Kapoor of Microsoft India mentions several applications like iPhone, Mac Osx, Adobe Buzzword and word processors like OpenOffice Novell Edition, WordPerfect Office X3 (beta), Dataviz Docs, NeoOffice support Open XML.

Migration and Backward Compatibility
Another area from the consumer perspective is backward compatibility. What happens to all our documents that have been created over the past decades? From the government perspective, there could be millions of land records, for companies it could be thousands of documents. Microsoft’s Kapoor says “Back compatibility is an important issue that has been looked into. In other words, all past documents can not only be migrated but also be accessed.” He mentions of Microsoft migration tools and emphasizes on “Open XML bringing forward old formats with full fidelity.”

Microsoft’s Kapoor gives a very interesting insight: “Google and IBM have done a superb implementation of Open XML!”
Google and IBM are officially in the other camp that opposes Open XML and Microsoft in every forum but are also said to be actively developing compatible applications.

“Google has implemented Open XML so beautifully. It is impossible somebody do it without an understanding of the format,” Kapoor says. But Google’s official words are at odds with this.

“After technical analysis, we believe OOXML would be an insufficient and unnecessary standard, and we respectfully request international standards bodies to vote “no” on OOXML as a proposed standard,” Google’s Bhorat said.

IBM’s Ashish Gautam eches the view: “A large number of people believe that Microsoft’s format is technically flawed, restrictive, not adequately aligned with existing standards, or not conducive to broad third-party support.”

Why then are IBM and Google building applications around Open XML? It could be because the standards are a game in which players need to talk to each other. A bit like how India’s Independence leaders like Mahatma Gandhi mastered English — so they could fight British rule!

Document Socialism
It is a bit like an exclusive club not allowing many customers but suddenly waking up to social pressures to ease restrictions. Microsoft has now opened up to others stuff earlier covered by patents.

From a consumer perspective where is the future of document processing headed? Will multiple standards in documents lead of chaos? IBM’s Ashish Gautam cites the example of the tsunami fiasco where relief efforts were slowed down because of incompatibility of multiple formats.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s Kapoor links multiple formats to innovation. He cites the example of telephony where multiple standards like CDMA and GSM have only benefited the end consumer.

He also talks about multiple formats in images giving the end consumer the choice to choose from. Sun Micro’s Bhattarcharya adds an element of nationalism to standards “In the case of word processing, we are not talking about any ordinary consumers but those who will form the future of the nation, that is the children. However, these children may be denied access to computer literacy if a document standard is chosen that is not open and that is biased towards the vendors that supply the applications rather than being pro-people.”

Puneet Mehrotra writes a weekly column for HindustanTimes on technology. puneet@tbe.in

AIRTEL

I must compliment the Finance Minister for the substantial allocations for the Agriculture, Education & Healthcare sectors in this Budget. The budgetary support for irrigation to the tune of Rs. 20,000 Crores including Rs. 500 crores for micro-irrigation will cover over 4 lakh hectares of land, thereby helping the farmers to produce high-value crops. The outlay of Rs. 1,100 crores for the National Horticulture Mission and the targeted Gross Capital Formation in Agriculture at 16% by the end of the 11th Plan will play a pivotal role in enhancing the agricultural productivity, something which is key for maintaining the current growth momentum.
Rakesh Bharti Mittal, Vice Chairman, Bharti Enterprises

On the education sector, there has been a marked increase of 20% in the budgetary allocation to Rs. 34,400 crores that will provide an impetus to our goal of making India a knowledge economy. A substantial amount of this will be spent on creating 16 Universities and 3 IIT’s, establishing thousands of model schools and offering scholarships to general as well as science students for furthering education in the country. The creation of schools in areas with large concentration of Scheduled Castes & Scheduled Tribes students is a welcome step towards the development of the weaker section of society and making them employable in future. The move by the Government to extend the Mid-Day meal programme to upper primary schools will help address the issue of the large number of school drop-outs in the country. The National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme rolled-out across the country is yet another initiative that will benefit the rural youth to a large extent.

For the manufacturing sector, the total reduction of excise duties by 2% will give a welcome boost to the sector. Also, the exemption of specified parts of set top boxes from custom duties is indeed commendable and will help in reducing the costs for customers.

Through this Budget, the Finance Minster has strived to uplift the social sector in the country by emphasizing on education, healthcare and agriculture, which deserves a thumps up.

INTEL

“We are excited that the budget is focused on building the social infrastructure by increasing broadband connectivity and strengthening the education system across India. These measures are a step forward for transforming India into a knowledge society.”, R.Sivakumar, Managing Director - Sales and Marketing, South Asia, Intel.

LG Electronics India

The management of the economy is the responsibility of the government and we must compliment the government for the same. The budget 2008 has exceeded expectations in terms of rural development, education and agriculture. It is commendable that the economy has seen a growth rate of over 8.8 %. This budget will provide an impetus to inflation control. Specific to LG India, there will not be any major changes in terms of product pricing as there has been no major relief in duties. We welcome the relaxation in excise duty from 16 % to 14%.

However, for a manufacturer, as we are exposed to open competition with the various ASEAN countries, some relief on raw materials and intermediate goods would have made our industry competitive globally.
Read more

IBM today announced the System z10 mainframe to help clients create a new enterprise data center. The system z10 is designed from the ground up to help dramatically increase data center efficiency by significantly improving performance and reducing power, cooling costs, and floor space requirements. It offers unmatched levels of security and automates the management and tracking of IT resources to respond to ever-changing business conditions.

In addition to the z10, IBM also announced it has invested $300 million in architects, technical skills, as well as design and benchmarking centers to help clients transform to a new enterprise data center. Qualified clients can receive free assessment services to prioritize and take action to implement a more efficient, shared and dynamic IT infrastructure.

IBM’s next-generation, 64-processor mainframe, which uses Quad-Core technology, is built from the start to be shared, offering greater performance over virtualized x86 servers to support hundreds to hundreds of millions of users.*1

“The z10 also supports a broad range of workloads. In addition to Linux, XML, Java, WebSphere and increased workloads from Service Oriented Architecture implementations, IBM is working with Sun Microsystems and Sine Nomine Associates to pilot the Open Solaris operating system on System z, demonstrating the openness and flexibility of the mainframe”, said Sreenath Chary, Business Unit Executive, System z, IBM India/South Asia.

From a performance standpoint, the new z10 is designed to be up to 50% faster and offers up to 100% performance improvement for CPU intensive jobs compared to its predecessor, the z9, with up to 70% more capacity. * 2 The z10 also is the equivalent of nearly 1,500 x86 servers, with up to an 85% smaller footprint, and up to 85% lower energy costs. The new z10 can consolidate x86 software licenses at up to a 30-to-1 ratio. *3

Designed as Engine to Manage IT as a Service; Drive the New Enterprise Data Center

Businesses are working to not only greatly reduce the inefficiency and complexity of today’s data centers, but also share IT resources more efficiently and better align them to specific business objectives and ever-changing business conditions.

Read more

NASSCOM and the IT-BPO industry welcome the fact that the Union Budget is inclusive and has a strong focus on the social sector.

NASSCOM is however disappointed with the absence of any discussion on the extension of the STPI scheme. This is extremely critical for small enterprises and the BPO industry, as well as for expansion in tier 2 and tier 3 cities as they are unable to avail the benefits of the SEZ scheme. The STPI benefits are available till March 31 2009 and we are hopeful that through continued dialogue we will be able to convince the Government to consider our proposal and help India garner the large opportunity in this sector.

We have seen the advantage of IT deployment in the country. However the imposition of service tax of 12% on customised software and higher excise duty on packaged software could lead to increased cost of IT and could slow down the IT usage in the domestic sector. This impacts in particular, small and medium enterprises who have just started deploying IT.

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According to Michelle Quinn in Los Angeles times music downloads are on the increase resulting to CD sales going down. Going to the mall to buy music may no longer be a rite of passage for adolescents. For the first time last year, nearly half of all teenagers bought no compact discs, a dramatic increase from 2006, when 38% of teens shunned such purchases, according to a new report released Tuesday.
The illegal sharing of music online continued to soar in 2007, but there was one sign of hope that legal downloading was picking up steam. In the last year, Apple Inc.’s iTunes store, which sells only digital downloads, jumped ahead of Best Buy Co. to become the No. 2 U.S. music seller, trailing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Google now has a pretty good and easy web-page creator with some wiki features made user-friendly, and a half-hearted attempt at integrating the rest of the Apps empire using Sites. Perhaps they get it right in the next release says Zoli Erdos
he wrote “After 16 months at Google developer’s hands, the outcome is substandard. This is such a pity. In its JotSpot incarnation, it was far from perfect but that didn’t matter because JotSpot was shedding light on a new way of collaborating. Since passing into Google’s hands, the guts have been ripped out and then re-assembled with as much Google ’stuff’ as they could cram in but rushed to completion. At the very least, Google should get rid of the gadgets addition facility and rework it. Otherwise, I sense the SMBs at which it is aimed will find the service a turn off.”

Will the magic of Google work? Watch out for more.

Money is perhaps the power behind the economy for a nation, for an organization and for an individual too. Read more

As finance and business evolves so do its instruments. Consider the leap man has taken in the world of world and finance. The results are convenient and availablity of money when and where required. Read more