Peter Quinn's resignation

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Thank you Peter!

Sir Issac Newton once famously said, ?If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.?

Perhaps one day in the not so distant future, when Open Standards and Open XML technologies like ODF triumph, the head of HomeLand Security will stand in front of the then highly competitive and rapidly advancing information technology industry, with throngs of government leaders, the President, Cabinet and congressional dignitaries, a sea of computational consumers and global technologists looking on, and say, ?If we have seen further it is by standing on the dead bodies of great CIO's who had the courage to do the right thing......? And such will begin but another stirring tribute to one Peter Quinn.

For the life of me i can't figure out why Microsoft is taking such a hard line on ODF. Sure it's a threat to their monopoly and future plans of total world domination. In the past though, with such great threats as HTML, the browser, and Java, Microsoft stuck to the reprehensible but thoroughly reliable and proven ?embrace and extend? tactic. It always works. So why do they refuse to touch ODF? I mean, why didn't they join the OASIS OpenDocument TC, work to seek the lowest common denominator threshold possible, and then extend their own implementation to meet their own platform specific needs? Why did they choose to throw down the gauntlet with ODF?

Not that i'm not grateful they choose to make their stand with ODF. I am. The worst thing that could have ever happened to ODF would have been to have Microsoft take on the standing invitation and offer to participate, then intentionally mucking up the work, dumbing down the specification to an un acceptably low common denominator; all the while lying in wait to spring an enhanced, platform specific version. Instead, Microsoft choose to make a stand, and do whatever it takes, no matter how illegal or reprehensible. What's changed in Redmond? Did they take ODF for a chump?

Everything Peter Quinn stood for will soon enough be vindicated by the analysis of the ECMA MSXML specification. I've often said that ODF is a wrapper of Open XML technologies. And that MSXML is a wrapper of proprietary technologies. But the recently released ECMA MSXML specification says something else. Something so seriously binding that we'll all remember fondly and long the good ole days when MSXML was filled with binary and application specific dependencies. The ECMA MSXML spec has gone far beyond what now looks trivial in comparison. The application dependencies have been replaced by platform dependencies and an entanglement of system interfaces and protocols that is breathtaking.

ECMA won't be ratifying an XML file format specification. They are now in the business of rubber stamping MS Vista as a platform standard. And with that, Peter Quinn will have the last laugh. His ride into the sunset will mark forever an important turning point in the history of information technologies. The point where, filled with great hubris, Microsoft finally overplayed their hand.

Hooray for Peter! Job well done! And many thanks for staying the course and getting it right.

~ge~

Posted by: gary_edwards   Posted on: 01/02/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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