As the Timid Turn

Computerworld - I have little doubt that when a lot of people read the news on our Web site last week that the Canadian company Corel and the Chinese company Lenovo had inked a deal to ship Corel's WordPerfect office productivity suite on a new line of Lenovo PCs, they could barely contain their disgust (see Lenovo to ship Corel office suite on new PC line).

"How could those Canadians sell out to the Chinese that way? We let them have WordPerfect, and now they're letting the Chinese get their hands on it," they'll mutter. "Don't they realize that government and law offices all over America use WordPerfect? I bet this will even give the Chinese the means to tamper with the source code and ultimately sabotage our legal system." I'm just waiting for the House Committee on International Relations, ignorant of the fact that Corel is based in Ottawa, to try calling Corel executives on the carpet for compromising our national security.

Oddly enough, when I read that news on our Web site last week, I could barely contain my disgust, either. But not because I was hallucinating about the Red Menace.

For as long as I care to remember, I've listened to software vendors, Corel among them, whine about Microsoft's anticompetitive practices and its monopolistic stranglehold on the marketplace. All they wanted, they wailed, was a level playing field where they could compete.

So what bothered me about the Corel/Lenovo announcement isn't what it said, but what it didn't say. This is what Corel should have announced to you:

"As part of its strategic plan to work with Lenovo and other hardware vendors to offer users the choices they deserve, Corel is announcing full support for the OASIS OpenDocument format as a standard for office productivity applications. In doing so, Corel is fulfilling its long-standing commitment to deliver products that will free users from the fetters of proprietary file-saving formats."

Unfortunately, Corel said none of that, and in fact has meekly surrendered to Microsoft by all but abandoning ODF. An especially unpleasant element of that turnabout is that Corel has backtracked on assurances it gave Massachusetts that it would support the state's controversial effort to standardize on ODF -- a standard that Corel itself was instrumental in formulating.

Last fall, in response to former Massachusetts CIO Peter Quinn's request for feedback on the Enterprise Technical Reference Model, which identified ODF as the state's standard for creating and saving official records, Richard Carriere, Corel's general manager for office productivity, was effusive in his support. Here's an excerpt from his response: