Michael Meeks has a tough job. Anyone who's struggled with making documents not created in Word interface with Microsoft Office should be able to sympathise.
As a distinguished engineer and architect at Novell, Meeks is tasked with tackling interoperability between Novell's OpenOffice.org productivity suite and Microsoft Office, a job made easier as a result of the high-profile tie-up between the previously vehement rivals.
If it's technically possible to make the project a success, Meeks is the man to do it, having earned a distinguished reputation as a software engineer. But, as with anything around interoperability and Microsoft, there is more to the issue than just the technology.
Things have been further complicated by IBM's recent entry into the OpenOffice.org community, as the company brings with it considerable experience in office applications and users through its own Lotus Domino offering. Faced with a string of competing office applications, not to mention hosted alternatives, such as Google Docs, an arena that was once dominated by Microsoft is looking distinctly crowded.
ZDNet.co.uk met Meeks at the OpenOffice.org forum in Barcelona and talked standards, compatibility and interoperability.
Thanks to Novell's relationship with Microsoft, is it fair to say the two companies are co-operating now?
I think at some level we do. [Novell] released this OpenDocument Format (ODF), which is now an ISO standard. I think people are really interested about not being locked into Microsoft's document standard — .doc. I like to talk to people about software freedom and the incredible power that comes from being able to tweak the software to your needs and adapt it and reuse it in different situations.
Sometimes it is difficult to explain to people, but it is easy to explain to them about their document data not being accessible to them. So there is huge traction out there and lots of people are starting to get interested in open standards and open formats.
So then Microsoft decided they were going to do an open standard too, and guess what: it is a .zip file and it's got XML streams inside it. But, having said that, it has been difficult in the past to do binary file format interoperability. You can make many good arguments that it is not a benefit to have one company totally dominating the market. You need some sort of file format interoperability.
Isn't one file format (such as ODF) better than two? Surely the weakness of having many is the confusion it creates?
Well, yes, and it should be ODF. In an ideal world... yes, a single file format that was a superset of features and so on would be ideal, but it is very difficult to even conceive of that happening. There is just such a lot of vested business interest in this sphere. It is just very difficult to do anything technical. I just can't see anything like that happening.
Turning Clippy off, in my estimation, is a single line of code change. With Microsoft you just couldn't do that
IBM has announced it will support OpenOffice.org. How do you see its contribution shaping up?
They are very involved in open source but they have held back from contributing to OpenOffice.org for various reasons. Now they have bitten the bullet and we will see how it goes. Software can only improve. It can always get better.
I think IBM brings real credibility to OpenOffice.org and, of course, huge resources. There are a lot of perspectives around this and mine is that a purchaser really wants multiple suppliers. They don't really want multiple implementations. It is no problem having multiple implementations, but it means rewriting the same thing again and again. If that turns you on, of course, then fine.
What they really want is to be able to say that, if this person won't support me, I will go to IBM, or Novell or whoever. Then you can have confidence that there will be people there who can support you. And, if someone is doing a really bad job, you can just switch to someone else and that has just never been the case in the software industry in recent history. There is no choice in document formats. You are tied into a single vendor.
Free software gives you the freedom that, even if you are a one-man shop, you can have it fixed if it is annoying you enough. The example I like to give is "Clippy" — remember? — that whipping boy of journalists. You couldn't turn it off and it came on and you had to talk to it before you came on.
Now turning Clippy off, in my estimation, is a single line of code change. With Microsoft you just couldn't do that. You couldn't get into their software, find the piece of code and...
Talkback
Michael Meeks has a tough job. Anyone who's struggled with making documents not created in the Word interface with Microsoft Office should be able to sympathise.
- extra 'the' makes the above confusing.
The example I like to give is "Clippy" — remember? — that whipping boy of journalists. You couldn't turn it off and it came on and you had to talk to it before you came on.
- 'before you came on' - does this refer to the menstrual cycle?
I can help feeling that the interviewer has not made the best sense of what Michael was saying to them.
I took down Michael’s words on my voice recorder. It was recorded at a reasonably noisy conference but the words were as spoken by him. I always aim to leave as many of the interviewees own words in as exactly spoken by him or her with the idea that you get the feeling of speaking to them. Some parts must be cut for length.
Michael is a charming, friendly and engaging person to talk to and I agree he has a tough job.
He was, however, being very careful about what he said, for obvious reasons. Novell’s involvement in open source is not popular with many people including, I think, Michael.
The “Clippy” quotes are word for word. As for “came on”, I knew what he meant and so left it. Maybe I should look at that again.
As any interviewer can tell you, the precise language people use is rarely what they would like to see in print. The trick is to leave enough intact, while not making them sound like John Prescott.
Thanks for the feedback. The intro's extra 'the' was a mistake introduced at the editing stage so no fault of Colin's and we are fixing it now.
As for the transcription -- it's hard balance to strike between cleaning up quotes and keeping the structure of how an interviewee speaks. But we tend to favour the latter as it makes for a more interesting interview.
As anyone who's been in management long enough should know, it's not what people say that really counts in job interviews - it's how they say it - and some of the same goes for journalism.
Sorry Colin, I was being too harsh.
Andrew - Yes, it is the journalist's task to convey the underlying sense of what is being said. It would have been good to see the comments Colin made in answer to my feedback in the original article to give context to the quoted words.
I was drawn in by the title of the article, but frustrated becauase the point was not well elucidated. I find it hard to maintain enough faith in the quality of the writing to discern the subtext once I've come across a few ambiguous or awkard sentences - my failing.
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