The Future of Wordprocessing is Bright

The tide finally seems to be turning in the ever exciting world of document standards and enterprise level document software. Freedom from Microsoft’s lousy and propriety standards may be near. There are several recent developments that are worth note.

First things first, it seems Microsoft’s new defacto document type OOXML is not gaining traction on the web. Over the past few months there has been a lot of buzz regarding Microsoft’s push for OOXML to become an ISO standard. Of particular interest are the stories about bribery for votes.

Another interesting angle on this wave of change is the recent release of Google’s new presentation software. Another is IBM’s announcement that it will join the OpenOffice.org movement with its new Lotus Symphony release.

While Google Docs is still in its infancy and there are still troubling questions regarding portability of your documents it goes a long way towards bridging the gap between fully fledged online enterprise software and it’s desktop counterparts. Speaking of bridging the gap, Yahoo! also recently acquired Zimbra in a move that looks to shake things up a bit in this sector. It will be interesting to see how the added competition by a major contender on the bleeding edge of technology will effect innovation. My guess is that it will lead to the adoption of ODF as a method for importing files from one service to the other.

Another alternative to Microsoft Office, that I would be remiss in omitting, is the granddaddy of them all. StarOffice is Sun Microsystem’s proprietary software suite who’s source code is the basis for OpenOffice. It could provide an enterprise solution to companies looking at alternatives but still need support. Just as all of the other variants of the OpenOffice suite, StarOffice supports ODF as the document standard.

What does all of this mean? Microsoft Vista hasn’t proved to be the overwhelming success that Redmond, Wa. had hoped it would be. In fact many in the tech community have even called it a bust. Whereas a successful push by MS from XP to Vista would have essentially forced the community to accept OOXML as the standard much as it has been forced to in the past with other standards, a failed product release has made their modus operandi much less tenable. The future of word processing is bright because there finally seems to be an emergence of democracy in technology that is long overdue.

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