Mass Sweating

Computerworld - I saw it the moment my 14-year-old daughter and I walked out of our local Home Depot here in Massachusetts a couple of Saturdays ago. There in the parking lot was my prized, pristine Miata, with a big dent in the right rear fender. Given that the dent wasn't there when we walked into the Home Depot, I wasn't too pleased.
You know what goes through your mind. The hassle. The expense. The cowardice and selfishness of the person who hit it and then didn't bother to leave a note. I was, as they say, fit to be tied.
I was still fuming about it that evening when I was watching the news on TV. Until, that is, I watched a mother and father being interviewed about their daughter being struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver. She was 14.
I was, rightfully, even more angry at myself than I had been at the person who put a dent in my car. A stupid dent. It was a pretty good reminder of how important it is not to sweat the small stuff.
It's a reminder that a lot of people in Massachusetts would do well to ponder. Especially today, as Louis Gutierrez assumes his position as the state's CIO and takes a seat that had gotten too hot for his predecessor, Peter Quinn, who resigned last month (see CIO who backed Open Document in Mass. resigns).
What stoked the fire under that seat was, of all things, Massachusetts' plan to adopt the XML-based OpenDocument format as a standard for saving files. To give you an idea of what's at stake here, Sun's StarOffice productivity suite and IBM's Workplace support OpenDocument; Microsoft Office does not.
Massachusetts is the first major government entity in the U.S. to launch an OpenDocument plan -- a troubling precedent for Microsoft and others who oppose the format. So, what was supposed to be a healthy debate on technology standards collapsed into a tawdry political battle. And Quinn, who was leading the OpenDocument charge, found himself in the political cross hairs. It got to the point where an investigation was launched into out-of-state trips taken by Quinn to speak at technology conferences, prompted by questions from The Boston Globe about the propriety of such trips. When it was over, the Globe reported that Quinn was found to have done nothing wrong. But by then Quinn had had it.
"Enough is enough," Quinn told Computerworld's Carol Sliwa in a recent interview (see Former Mass. CIO says Job Became Too Political).