« Howard Stern as father of Web 2.0 | Main | Business Filter posts in today's print Boston Globe »

Friday, May 26, 2006

Massachusetts geek vindication

Source: Forbes

Speaking of locking up (or unlocking) real estate, an International Standards body (ISO) recently accepted the Open Document Format (ODF) as a standard for saving and exchanging digital office documents. That's a big win for open source and a blow to Microsoft whose proprietary Office file formats have been the de facto standard for years.

And in no insignificant way, it's partly thanks to Peter Quinn, the former CIO of Massachusetts, a man who endured a political firestorm and a Boston Globe story alleging he'd misused state funds for travel. (He was exonerated but quit his job soon after.) Quinn stirred things up when he made it a state policy that by January 2007 all state employees would begin saving their work in open formats such as HTML, PDF, and ODF so they would work on anyone's software, not just Microsoft's. Peter Quinn, described by Forbes as the mild-mannered geek from Boston who took on Microsoft – vindicated.