IT Investment Research

IBM and cloud computing: Back to the future

Back to the future. What goes around comes around. Circle of life. Déjà vu all over again. And so forth.

I spent two days this week at an analyst meeting listening to and talking with some very smart IT men and women, a group of marketing and development managers at The IBM (IBM) Company. The meeting’s title was “Next Generation Linux and Open Source.” But to these IBM managers and executives that phrase is redundant. Linux and adjunct open source software (OSS) is already the next-generation technology. And these guys also said that OSS is only a technology tactic, which I was happy to hear from an investment research point of view. For these IBM folks, OSS is a means for getting to the next generation of computing, cloud computing.

Coincidentally this week, I was looking for a 2-year-old white paper of mine that I knew was on the web but was not on the laptop I was carrying with me. While googling my own name, I came across a 13-year-old document, Moving Mainframe VM Users to a Distributed UNIX System. The article is available on the Association for Computing Machinery [ACM] portal--subscription required--and its author apparently used some of my 1995 research into client/server computing acceptance in the market to make his point. In the cloud computing era that IBM sees coming, large enterprises and organizations serving IT resources to small and medium enterprises—let’s call these organizations Service Bureaus for lack of a better name—can reverse the process described in the title of the 1995 ACM document. Already I was told at the IBM Linux/OSS analyst meeting, users can move distributed applications (be they UNIX, Linux, Windows or legacy) back to a VM mainframe, the latest IBM Zseries system.

But for me, that 13-year-old research at the ACM site is only one third of the way back to the future. As IBM described its view of the cloud computing, I flashed to the Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (Multics), one of the first IT products about which I ever did research. According to its alumni web site, Multics is a timesharing operating system begun at MIT in 1965, used in production (marketed by Honeywell and subsequently Bull) until 2000, and now available from MIT under open source terms and conditions.

But while Multics was groundbreaking for its virtual memory, IBM’s cloud features virtual everything, including administration. Multics was all about Utility Computing but had no “dynamo;” IBM’s cloud features content and context as well as the transmission lines. For Multics the last mile, at least originally, lead to a very small number of primitive terminal (initially a teletype device) for use by programmers. IBM’s cloud potentially interfaces billions of individuals, trillions of sensors and (whatever the next order word is) of bytes of data.

But from an IT investment research perspective, the question is “Can IBM put the PC genie back in the bottle after all these years?”

In 1965, before the Multics operating system itself was even written, two members of the Multics team wrote a sociological view of what utility/cloud computing would mean. Its findings/warnings ring pretty true today. Read its description of a theoretical automated tax-calculation program that might be written to be used on the Multics system. The implication was that the government would write and possess this Big Brother application. The sections in the 1965 paper about The Threat to Privacy and the Cult of Impersonality say it all 43 years later.

Of course, the complex government-owned application that the Multicians described in 1965 became available to the masses 20 years later on Wintel PCs from companies such as ChipSoft/Intuit and Meca. As a result many people now prefer to control their own IT destiny, and especially things like their own tax data. If cloud computing as IBM envisioned it is to become pervasive, these same concerns need to be considered vis a vis documents, search histories (I assume that train has already left the station?) and all other aspects of our lives. Businesses share the same concerns as individuals in terms of sending their crown jewels out into the ether but on a different scale.

Whatever happens to the IBM cloud computing vision, there is no doubt its technology will provide a very real payback for large enterprises, like IBM itself, with thousands of servers deployed. And it was great to see something that was just a concept so many years ago finally coming to life.

(Oh by the way, to close the circle with a double knot, prehistoric IT campfire storytelling tradition has it that the name UNIX derived in a backasswards way from Multics. Thompson and Ritchie lost access to the Multics system, on which they did some prehistoric gaming (as well as some real work) when Bell Labs dropped out of the Multics consortium in 1969. So supposedly they wrote a much simpler operating system to take its place, which colleagues called the un-Multics, or Unics for short. A more professional version of what happened, written by Dennis Ritchie himself, is available here.)

For Microsoft, there is more than one way to skin a standard

I don’t think de jure standards (so-called international Open Standards) of any type have any particular meaning in the real world. In information technology [IT] markets at least, most so-called international Open Standards (always upper case) are retroactive acknowledgements that some particular facet of a widget is already the most popular widget facet of that type in the market. For more detail, see my more than 30 years of IT market research on CORBA, 88 Open, Ethernet, OSF, the seven layers of the Open Systems Interconnection model, PARS, SQL, X-Open, HTML, blah blah blah, blah blah blah. The acronyms you recognize were popular first, then made standards.

Also in real-world IT markets at least, some smart guys come up with a workaround long before a standards body can find its gavel… if the market demand is there. So investors should note that whether or not the ECMA and Microsoft (MSFT) are again denied International Standards Organization (ISO) fast-track approval of their Office Open XML (OOXML) standard on March 29, the pair is just going to keep on trucking down the real-world popularity road to standardization. And they are going to use the king of open source organizations, the Apache Software Foundation, to help them do it.

Microsoft and Sourcesense, a European open-source-oriented systems integration consultancy, have announced that they will move Microsoft-Office-based open source solutions to market by contributing to the new version of Apache’s POI. According to Wikipedia, POI stands for "Poor Obfuscation Implementation" referring to the fact that the “old” Office file formats (.doc, .xls) seemed to be deliberately obfuscated, but so poorly that they were successfully and quickly reverse-engineered so that Java programs could talk to Office. Currently only a working copy of POI supports new Office (that is, OOXML) file formats but the POI community expects this support to make it into a full release by June-July 2008. To make that happen, Microsoft and Sourcesense are going to help. Sourcesense brings experience in catalyzing other Apache technologies and open source development practices. Microsoft obviously brings its knowledge of the 6000 pages of the OOXML spec.

By email, I asked Gianugo Rabellino, CEO of Sourcesense if he wasn't afraid he'd be set adrift in the middle of the Mediterranean in a rubber dinghy for consorting with the enemy, given that we're constantly told here in the U.S. that all of Europe is totally against OOXML. His kind response: "providing OOXML support for the same functionalities (as previously provided for earlier versions of Office) is a logical step and something that the POI community might have decided to add anyways at a certain point in the future: doing that in collaboration with Microsoft looks like a good step in the right direction, both for Microsoft and Open Source." Bravo!

So ISO standard or not, it will soon be as easy for Java software to move information to and from Microsoft Office 2007 as it is for the same software to move information to and from Office 2003 and earlier versions of Office. OOXML, although it has only been actively marketed for a little more than a year, is quickly becoming as popular—depending on how you measure such things—as the leading ISO standard document format, Adobe’s PDF (relative to when PDF was anointed an ISO standard). The POI relationship will only hasten that acceptance.

-- Dennis Byron

Neelieland Part 1-A European travel log from the future: In 2026, the EU looks like Cuba in 2006

It's the summer of 2026 and the Chinese-made Boeing 808 hyperplane is touching down at Shannon, one of only two hyperplane spoke end points in the European Union (EU), and just a short 3-hour hop from the New England air hub in New Hampshire, at the former Pease AFB. The other EU air hub is on the shores of the Black Sea near Bourgas. Pease and Perth are the worldwide hubs of the hyperplane hub and spoke system.

These two access points put businesspeople down right in the super economic zones that the EU has set up to try to regain some semblance of relevance to the world economy, not including the leisure travel industry. Even the leisure travel portion of the EU economy is suffering because of the global climate change that has been ongoing since the 1990s. Global climate change has made Europe so cold eight months of the year that most people will only visit in the May-August timeframe. The zones are like the late 20th century maquiladoras in Mexico.

On the other hand, if you've come to Europe for pleasure, Shannon and Bourgas are great places to begin or end a vacation because you use the old-style transportation to get anywhere in between. The rest of Europe is like a full-scale Epcot. Of course, Shannon is not the Shannon you remember because the EU has had to level everything from the Bunratty to the Rine up to SixMile Bridge to put the air hub here. As usual, the people in the West got... (can't say that on a public blog post).

I am almost 80 and this will probably be my last visit to Europe where I came often to live, work and play between 1970 to 2005. For a variety of reasons, I have not been here since 2005. After the dictatorship began, Europe no longer mattered from a business point of view and as great as Europe is as a "destination," for its museum quality, its historic sites, etc., everyone said it was too depressing. Even after the euro settled in at about 2 to the dollar after 2011, Europe was a hard sell.

But everyone should go at least once... sort of like everyone should see the Grand Canyon.

I had been warned but it was still shocking. I had a little bit of the strange feeling I had been warned about at the airport. But I assumed it was just the typical "another country" feeling, that back-in-time sensation I remember from sitting on the siding in Hendaye in the 70s as the SCNF cranes lifted the WagonLit to get it on to the Spanish train tracks. You remember how important everyone says Open Standards (always upper case) were and are in Europe?

The first time I really realized what people were talking about was while watching the hotel clerk huddled over a screen. The screen displayed an application that looked vaguely familar but I couldn't recognize it. I asked if I could look closer. My god! It was Microsoft Office 2003.

Then I realized what caused the feeling I had had walking through the air hub. Everyone there was using Microsoft Office 2003 too. It was like those pictures of Cuba you see 50 years after dictatorship began. Just as many people that had to deal with the outside world in Cuba were still using old Chevies and Fords 50 years after the dictatorship began, in Europe 20 years after the dictatorship began, everyone that has to deal with the rest of the world is still using Office 2003.

What was going on in the rest of Europe I wondered, in the tourist backwaters such as London and Frankfort? I bet the Open Culture (always upper case) zone that Holland had become probably used more up to date technology. No wonder Russia didn't chose not to join the EU when invited in 2013.

And was Gene Kelly still "Singing in the Rain" every Sunday night on French government television?

(Travelog of my 2026 return to Europe--to be continued)

Open Standards; Open Wallet: The real Massachusetts story about Sun/IBM ODF and Microsoft OOXML

One of the biggest scams on the Internet is the deception that Massachusetts state government is an early adopter "Open Standards" state. An otherwise good March 14, 2008 InfoWorld story about the Microsoft (MSFT) Office Open XML (OOXML) software developers kit by senior editor Ephraim Schwartz reminds me that knocking down the story is a never-ending task. Schwartz, despite reporting in his own magazine to the contrary, apparently reflexively repeats the conventional wisdom that Massachusetts has "already made (its) decision in favor of Open Document Format (ODF)." Surpringly to me, when I asked him to check his sources, he cited two-year-old techtarget and CBR stories rather than his own reporter. Even if he corrects his story, as he should, it has been syndicated a dozen times over the weekend and repeated a hundred times by the anti-Microsoft blogoblatherers. The deception continues to spread.

So, one more time: Massachusetts has not made a "decision in favor of ODF." It's not true today. It never was true.

Here's what really happened (check the documents themselves at the links provided if you prefer):

1. In 2005, one department in one part of one branch of Massachusetts government--called the Information Technology Division (ITD)--issued, possibly illegally, a document which said that the state would only use documents produced in the following four "standard" formats: HTTP, ODF, Adobe PDF (it was not an ISO standard at the time) and TXT. Separately ITD said this policy would go into effect beginning in 2007

2. The multiple-year process that led up to this four-format (not ODF-format) proposal began in 2002 with a study most likely orchestrated by ITD and conducted by IBM (IBM) for an advisory commission that included a Sun (JAVA) employee but no Microsoft employee. Sun is the inventor of ODF; IBM uses ODF in one of its less popular Lotus products. Microsoft was a major supplier of technology to the state at the time and should have been included on the commission (or all vendors should have been barred).

3. Almost immediately after the ITD mandate was released, a Massachusetts legislative committee intervened informally to stop the ITD four-format mandate from being adopted. In July 2006, this same legislative committee formally issued a report entitled Open Source, Closed Government. (Note: the committee accurately describes the difference between open source terms and conditions and Open Standards in its report. I do not know why it chose to title its report as it did.)

The legislative committee found that a few state officials in ITD:
-- Ignored processes relative to government transparency (for example, issuing the offending policy for public comment a few days before the summer-ending long Labor Day holiday and making it final a few days after that holiday, decreasing the public comment period dramatically)
-- Ignored the comments and positions of many other effected departments and branches in state government (particularly those responsible for state records),
-- Ignored for three years legislative demands for cost/benefit analyses, taking into account total cost of ownership, of the implications of implementing only the four formats to the exclusion of the Microsoft "standard" and
— Most disturbing—ignored the legally blind, the hearing disabled, and others that would be unable to deal with state government under the ITD proposal. The proposal would have also caused difficulties for thousands of disabled state employees.

I’d like to think the actions of this legislative committee was democracy at its finest. But you can’t jump to that conclusion (particularly since the committee took more than 2-1/2 years to issue its Open Source/Closed Government report, which gave the Open Standards blogosphere the time needed to spread the deception to which Schwartz fell victim last week). Rather than good government however, it is just as likely that Microsoft simply caught up with IBM's and Sun's five-year headstart in terms of legislative lobbying capabilities.

Whatever the reason, no Open Standards agenda has been foisted on us here in the Bay State. In 2007, Massachusetts added OOXML to the list of "standard" formats in its Open Formats category (as soon as OOXML was accepted by the ECMA International) and in fact now downloads documents off its website in Microsoft Real Text Format (RTF).

Investors need to care about this because Sun, IBM, Red Hat (RHAT) and others continue to try to achieve via legislation and government edict market position that they are unable to achieve in the free marketplace. Even if you agree with IBM/Sun/Red-Hat approach (it's not illegal or immoral), you need to build its implications into your investment research models. It adds considerable upfront cost to these companies' sales and marketing efforts with very little promise of return on investment.

I even believe Microsoft is wasting its shareholders' money in fighting IBM, Sun, Red Hat and the others, by either lobbying governments or lobbying so called "international standards groups." My research findings have consistently shown that "official international standards" do not affect the market. The outcry here in Massachusetts by other state employees and the disabled against the overreaching of a few anti-Microsoft staff people in ITD seems to bear that out.

-- Dennis Byron

Huh? Boycott this Boycott Novell baloney

Some web site called Boycott Novell (NOVL) has inexplicably posted an ad-hominen attack on my recent commentary on Microsoft (MSFT) wasting shareholder value by spending time on the so-called Open Standards effort.

Except that the blogger also seems to be attacking Microsoft? I'm actually not sure what his or her point is because the blog post is a little incoherent.

Anyways, To whom it may concern, despite what the Boycott Novell website says:

1 . I do not work for IDC

I did work for the Datapro division of McGraw Hill and IDC from 1991-2005. When I worked for IDC I did more work for Red Hat, IBM, Oracle and other proponents of Open Document Format (ODF) than I ever did for Microsoft, probably at a 10:1 ratio.

(Not that it matters, but the author of this ad-hominem post seems to have some obsession with IDC.)

2. I prepare a full-length magazine article a week and five blog posts a week and have done so every week for two years. In that period I have commented on ODF about five times.

(I therefore wouldn't put too much faith in his or her ability to get facts straight before writing a blog post about my obsessions--they have nothing to do with technology.)

3. My major research is primarily aimed at investors. A key issue for investors is the concerted effort by Sun (JAVA), Red Hat (RHAT) and others to lock SAP (SAP), Microsoft and others out of certain government markets through legislation, government regulation and so-called "international standards" bodies. A good example of that this month is the day by day drip-drip-drip PR effort by Sun, Red Hat, Google (GOOG), IBM (IBM) and others to derail International Standards Organization approval of Office Open XML (OOXML) because a vote is in progress. When I have mentioned ODF or OOXML in the last few weeks, it is an example of how these useless standards efforts lessen shareholder value.

(If the writer of this blog had actually read my blog posts, he or she would realize that my major criticism in this matter is against Microsoft. He or she would also see that I am against all so-called "Open international Standards," not ODF)

4. I have never seen this Boycott Novell web site before this morning (3/17/2008) and I do not know the author of this blog. I checked both my blogs and the Research 2.0 blog where I posted until last month and I cannot find any mention of Boycott Novell. Therefore I have not accused him or her of anything.

Microsoft sure brings 'em out of the woodwork.

-- Dennis Byron

Is Red Hat opposing new "international document standard" to lay ground work for ban on Windows?

Add Red Hat (RHAT) investors to the list of shareholder communitiess being poorly served by its corporate management in the matter of opposing a group of public companies and well-respected organizations trying to get a new document format standard approved by the International Standards Organization (ISO) this month. The group that Red Hat opposes includes Apple (APPL), Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, The Gnome Foundation, Intel (INTL), Microsoft (MSFT), NextPage, Novell (NOVL), Statoil, Toshiba, the United States Library of Congress, and ECMA International. The standard under review is Office Open XML (OOXML), the most popular implementation of which is Microsoft Office 2007.

In a standards process like this, a regional or functional organization such as ECMA International (formerly called the European Computer Manufacturers Association) takes the lead when going to ISO. By way of comparison with OOXML, AiiM carried the water to ISO for Adobe for .pdf and the OASIS Group (whose foundational sponsors are BEA, IBM, Primeton, SAP and Sun) was the conduit for Sun's Open Document Format (ODF). Red Hat says its primary objection to the ECMA standard is that there already is an ISO standard, Sun's ODF, for document formatting. But of course there are already multiple ISO document format standards such as Adobe's--with others coming.

So what does it matter if there is three or four or five? Red Hat's position is non-sensical unless you read between the lines. From an IT investment research point of view, you would think an infrastructure software supplier like Red Hat (Linux and JBoss middleware, which runs on top of both Linux and Windows) would want multiple suppliers offering application products in the "international" marketplace in order to sell more infrastructure software. This is especially true for JBoss, whose sales--as opposed to "free" open source distributions--have taken off slower than Red Hat had expected.

But apparently Red Hat is taking the restrictive position of trying to close off one market to Microsoft--even one that Red Hat itself does not compete in--on the hopes that eventually it can also convince governments around the world to close off the operating software market to Microsoft's Windows. Although Red Hat currently sells the Linux operating software primarily to replace 20- and 30-year old Unix operating software, it has said it plans on taking 50% of the infrastructure software market by 2015. Red Hat apparently believes to reach that goal it will also have to compete against Microsoft Windows server operating software at some point.

Red Hat also objects to the ECMA standard because Microsoft supposedly hasn't released some obscure specifications from the 1990s. Microsoft has released 30,000 pages of specfications and would certainly release 30,001 if need be.

Finally Red Hat crtiicized ISO's fast-track process. But of course, that's ISO's process--one it uses to standardize household items, airplanes, bowling balls, you name it--so to criticize Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, ECMA, Essilor, The Gnome Foundation, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba, and the United States Library of Congress because of the ISO rules is an incredible stretch. As Dr. Istvan Sebestyen, secretary general of ECMA explains via email: "In case of OOXML we tried to be very open, we have put up the first public draft in Summer of 2006. At the same time we intensified liaison with (ISO's) JTC 1 Sc34, and invited them to participate in our meetings. They also had our interim drafts. We have also installed on the internet a public response channel, on which interested people could submit their reactions to the draft.

"... (and) the standardization of PDF 1.7 fast track at ISO TC171 has been actually faster."

-- Dennis Byron

Microsoft financial analyst presentation highlights business applications' poor cousin status

The March 13 Microsoft (MSFT) presentation and Q&A session for financial analysts, conducted by the Busness Solutions general manager and by the Business Division CFO at Microsoft Convergence, hid the very slow payback Microsoft is realizing from its 2000 and 2002 investments in Great Plains and Navision respectively. Others are picking up my cry from a few years ago that Microsoft unload the entire operation; perhaps Great Plains founder Doug Burgum would come out of retirement and buy it back.

Kirill Tatarinov, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Solutions, says his group is playing in what IDC measures as a $70 billion market. He's referring to the entire packaged applications market. Certainly, at that level, which includes collaboration applications such as Office and so forth, Microsoft is doing great, probably with about 20% of the market.

But Tatarinov went on to say how happy Microsoft was about having a billion-dollar year in "Business Solutions" in the Microsoft fiscal year that ended in June 2007. That's Dynamics CRM plus the former Damagard, Great Plains, Navision, Solomon ERP products (which they now admit they will never try to "fuse" together, in "green" or any other color). That's only about 3% of the market SAP (SAP) and Oracle's (ORCL) applications group talks about when they talk about ERP and CRM.

Microsoft might counter that it effectively competes only in the midmarket. But it didn't. And that's good because certainly it has not made this now going-on-a-decade-long effort simply to compete for such a small slice of the applications market. Especially with SAP coming down market after that same slice.

On the good news side, I estimate Microsoft did about $1.2B in calendar year 2007, 22% growth. And it does have the advantage in that it is already in the midmarket and has great channel partners, something that SAP needs badly. In fact, Doug can stay in retirement. Why doesn't SAP just buy this part of the Microsoft business?

But overall it was a pretty weak status update full of a lot of trivia about how Microsoft is trying to tie its Dynamics users into eBay and online Paypal services. And the usual nod to Software Plus Service.

-- Dennis Byron

Free Software lawyers attack Microsoft attempt to standardize its office document formats

What did you expect Microsoft (MSFT)?  You give 'em an inch and they take a mile! Sun (JAVA) and IBM (IBM) continue to pummel Microsoft via obscure front groups and Microsoft just grins and bears it.

[There are a couple of things for information-technology (IT) investors to remember relative to this non-news flash: (1) free software is different than open source software (OSS), (2) the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) wants software to be free as in "air, trees, fish"--their analogy not mine--not free as in "at no cost," (3) so-called open standards have nothing to do with open source terms and conditions and/or the OSS development culture, (4) the concept of open standards is double-speak practiced by Sun, IBM and all of their front organizations as a way to manipulate the IT market, and (5) document format standards are a solution looking for a problem.

[On the latter point, do you really care that there are over 200 "international" standards for the size of real documents--that is, paper? And have these standards ever had any effect on your investments?]

As described here on March 7, Microsoft is in the process of wasting shareholder value by trying to get its Office Open XML (OOXML)--or Open Office XML--approved as an International Standards Organization (ISO) document format.  OOXML is the way Office 2007 saves documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Actually it is the European Computer Machine Association (ECMA) that is trying to secure ISO approval at Microsoft's behest. If approved, OOXML would join the ubiquitous PDF, put forward by AiiM at Adobe's (ADBE) request, and Sun's ODF, put forward by OASIS at Sun's urging. (That's right, if you are invested in these other companies, they are also wasting your money in this meaningless alphabet soup.)

On March 12, the SFLC IBM/Sun front organization joined the Open Source Initiative (OSI) statement on March 6 and other IBM/Sun front organizations like the documentfreedom.org (around March 1) in this coordinated attack against Microsoft about so-called open standards. IBM and Sun appear to be orchestrating an almost daily release of such blather. The reason is that ISO members are currently voting on the standard and Sun and IBM fear that approval of OOXML will hurt StarOffice and Lotus sales (actually in Sun's case, it is a concern that StarOffice sales will never get off the ground).

The jist of the breathless SFLC announcement is that Microsoft is not giving up its patent position in trying to get its Office 2007 formats "standardized." This is of course neither new news nor bad news for investors. In fact, it's about the only thing Microsoft is doing right by investors in this whole debacle.

And always keep in mind that standardizing IT docment formats is a solution chasing a problem.

-- Dennis Byron

Set my spreadsheets free!

An obscure web-based organization has declared March 26, 2008 Document Freedom Day (DFD), “a global day for Document Liberation with grassroots action for promotion of Free Document Formats and Open Standards in general… A "DFD Starter Pack" containing a flag, t-shirt, leaflets and stickers is in preparation and is planned to be sent out… to the first 100 teams that sign up.” The quote is from the group’s web site, Orwellian double-think, propagandistic capitalized nouns and all.

It is unclear whether the group plans on boycotting file cabinets around the world… or breaking them open with crow bars. There is no indication that they plan document burnings. But signs of what used to be called a front group when Orwell attacked totalitarianism are all over the web site. The document liberators that join a protest on March 26 in their DFD T-shirts are just pawns on the chess board. DFD in fact fronts for two major technology suppliers, Sun (JAVA) and IBM (IBM).

Sun and IBM, with the DFD group’s adolescent help, is currently attacking Microsoft. Somehow, in best Orwellian revisionist terms, the DFD folks avoid the fact that IBM and Sun are no better (or worse) when it comes to standards. ‘Open Standards’ is really a political manipulation of language anyways. They are simply words certain technology junkies hurl at others to indicate displeasure over technical features and functions they do not like… and therefore believe no one else should be allowed to choose. The words ‘Open Standards’ themselves represent good old Orwellian double-think. After all, what good would a closed standard be?

More specifically, DFD day is a political-theater sideshow in a battle over the way the three technology companies’ respective next-generation office suites natively “save” word processing, spreadsheet and presentation files. Microsoft invented and uses the Office Open XML (OOXML) format; Sun (via a 2000 acquisition) invented and uses the Open Document Format (ODF) format; IBM has adopted ODF for one of its less popular Lotus office products. DFD is simply about Sun and IBM trying to recapture market share they have lost over the years because of inferior products.

IBM Cognos gets sweet deal from Massachusetts pols

UPDATE 3/12: The state of Massachusetts has cancelled this contract according to the March 12 Boston Globe (may require subscription other than on day of publication)

UPDATE 3/11: The third to last sentence has been changed since the original posting. I am using a new blogging engine and sent it public before I had checked a fact. I do not know if the then Massachusetts IT director, who later resigned over alleged travel-expense irregularities, had Sun appointed to the taskforce or whether Sun's appointment was arranged by someone else. Also I do not believe Cognos was part of IBM when the sales process described in the Boston Globe article referenced below began.

For all the "open IT" crowd out there disturbed that Microsoft bribed a bunch of Swedish kids into voting for the Open Office XML document format, read the March 10 Boston Globe (possibly only available by subscription other than on the day it ran). As usual Massachusetts shows you how the big boys play ball. Here's the lead:

"The state inspector general has found that a Canadian software company was improperly awarded a $13 million contract last year in an unusually rushed deal in which House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi had an active interest. At almost every turn, DiMasi, his aides, or his friends played a role in either creating a demand for Cognos ULC's computer software or in pushing Cognos to the head of the bidding field. DiMasi personally met with the state's chief information officer to push for the kind of software that Cognos produces. A middleman in the deal, Joseph Lally, portrayed himself to key state officials as DiMasi's friend. A longtime DiMasi friend, Richard McDonough, was hired as a lobbyist for Cognos and was paid $100,000 by the company."

It goes on from there to allege all kinds of corruption. Open IT types are always talking about the Sun/IBM attempt to railroad ODF through the Massachusetts state legislature. Massachusetts quickly saw that its “independent” IT taskforce was run by IBM Global Services on a consulting contract and jury rigged by having Sun appointed to it. Even the Massachusetts legislators, the guys that perfected hardball political machination, were appalled. The ODF standardization ploy never even made it “out of committee.”