Novell: where have the PR folk gone?

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 06 December 2006 05:33

Opinion and Analysis

Tech companies corner market share by creating a standard and then making it the dominant one. They do it in different ways - some make the basic standard open and then offer value-adds once the standard has gained a wide degree of acceptance. The best example I can think of is the PDF standard which Adobe created. Tthere was once a time when any document exchange between companies was limited to .doc files - Microsoft's standard for its Word application. Now PDFs outnumber .doc files by more than 2 to 1. Once the PDF standard spread, Adobe created proprietary features which could be added to the basic PDF. Given that document security is now big business, John Warnock is now busy counting the moolah.

Other companies use more devious means to push their standards. I won't go back into history but most big and medium-sized tech companies have indulged in such parctices.

Thus it is not surprising that Microsoft tried to influence Massachusetts away from the open document format once the US state made its preference known in 2005. When I use the word "influence", I use it loosely, because Microsoft's efforts went far beyond what you and I would understand by that word.

When I hear of the word "open" being used by Microsoft, I am reminded of the way some Western companies use the word "halal" to push their products in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. The exact translation of halal is "permissible under Islamic law" - but in non-Arabic speaking countries it mostly refers to food which is permitted to be eaten by practising Muslims. Given this, using the word "halal" on toilet soap has no meaning - but that is exactly how some companies tried to push their wares.

The same goes for the word "open" when used in Redmond. The standard may be open today but there is nothing to stop Microsoft from tweaking it a wee bit down the road and making inter-operability with other applications less than perfect. This has happened far too many times in the past for anyone to believe that the opposite will transpire.

And so, we're back to Novell. I wonder who handles PR for them. Anybody with even a hint of commonsense would have told them that this was the worst possible time to be seen as entering into a closer embrace with the boys in Redmond. Given this, one can only conclude that Novell does not care if it is viewed in this manner any more.

And while hysterical shouts from some - the owner of the partisan Groklaw website, Pamela Jones, for example, that this amounts to a forking of OpenOffice.org - are just so much rubbish, Novell's action is definitely going to lead to more bad blood between itself and the free and open source software community.