I wrote the following in September 2007, and it may well be overtaken by recent annoucements by Microsoft about their interoperability: http://www.microsoft.com/interop

The OLPC project (One Laptop Per Child) aims to give one laptop per child in the developing world. Some people in the media haven’t really understood what the project is about and think it is a bit odd to spend money on laptops when infrastructure or medicine might be a better way to spend the money in countries that don’t even have constant power supplies (forgetting that they can be hand-powered or even solar powered). The OLPC project is actually about education and being poor - or rather the idea being that generally speaking educated people tend not to stay poor. It’s a project I believe in from both a social justice point of view, but also from a technology point of view too - everything on it is open source from top to bottom.

As I’ve read more of Microsoft’s anti-interoperability tactics I’ve realised how much they have hindered the progress of technology and productivity - rather than just believing the anti-Microsoft slur I’ve been reading up on them and how they lock-in governments, businesses and organisations through their Windows stack. The war about desktop Operating Systems was over years ago - even with the brilliant Ubuntu - but the war is no longer about desktops but about business information systems.

You see, you can no longer just install Ubuntu on everyone’s machine in your organisation because you cause a cascade of breakages upstream. What are you going to do about Exchange/SharePoint? Microsoft are refusing to release code that would make Sharepoint interoperable with all the other systems (both Open Source and non-) so if you want to be compatible with everything then you have to own Microsoft software because they’re the ones that are last to commit (or don’t commit). So if you’re a government who has already bought 25 millions copies of Windows 2000/XP/Vista and has fully bought into the Vista Stack (as it is now called) then the thought of switching over to Open Stack is almost unthinkable - Microsoft’s stranglehold on the stack means it is virtually impossible to unwind any organisation (for migration) with any decent information hubs.

If we were playing poker Microsoft would be the chip bully with (almost) infinite chips - how do you play against that? I’m a big fan of the Open Stack idea, and a huge fan of the OpenDocument format (which Microsoft do not and will not support natively in their Office applications unless they have a serious change of heart). Microsoft continue their hampering of technological and productivital advance (is that a word?) in the name of profit and capitalism, but they make sure they do enough “good” so that they always have a way out in any public argument. The world is at their mercy and boy are they making us pay.

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