Michael Brauer

The incompatibility of today's proprietary file formats goes well beyond the inconvenience of, say, unreadable e-mail attachments. It raises the larger issue of ownership - and cost of ownership. The data in your spreadsheet, the content in your business presentation, the words in your word processor - all of these belong to you. You created them. But today most of these documents are stored within binary formats, which means they're worthless without the applications that created them. (That's like owning a car but having to ask someone else for the keys every time you want to drive it.) Worse, there's no guarantee, given today's undocumented, proprietary formats, that these documents will be readable even five years from now. This makes archiving complicated and costly. In an increasingly connected world, you should also be able to share the content you create wit... (more)