Simon Phipps Quotations

We'll see some waves of improvement in 2003, but I'm not holding out hope for a huge rise.

It is beginning to dawn on users that this is a matter of long-term ethical responsibility. We need to preserve our heritage and make sure that when the great things are done by various politicians, representatives and civil servants we will be able to, in 30 to 50 years, actually read the material.

You don't need to fear diversity in tagging vocabularies. They are inevitable, because businesses are so diverse, ... But if you're going to live with differences, you're going to need strong transformation technologies. That's why the key to XML is not representation, but rather transformation.

We want to make clear what the benefits of using ODF are for government users who have a strong concern the documents they are creating remain a part of their history and heritage, rather than being lost in a digital Alzheimer's as document formats change.

We will continue to have this problem with drifting file formats and the loss of society's memory. That will continue to be a problem until there is a multi lateral baseline file format.

The strategy to embrace, extend, and extinguish has not necessarily gone away,

If the ODF Alliance had existed a few month's ago it would have been a lot easier for Massachusetts to focus on the technology issues rather than the personalities involved.

By getting its specification approved by a standards body that does not allow individual members is a strategy to make sure that Microsoft continues to control that standard and thus prevent it from becoming a baseline. At the same time, Microsoft is also trying to prevent a multilateral file format from being implemented.

The first thing they could do is open up their software to get help fixing all the bugs in their products.