IBM Can't Win With A Thin Envelope

IBM has sent a letter to the head of Massachusett's department of Administration and Finance urging him not to be fooled by Microsoft's PR campaign to promote its Office Open XML as an "open" format, and to continue his predecessor's support for the Open Document Format. My guess is IBM made only one mistake -- all it put in the envelope was the letter.The letter followed Massachusetts state government's flip-flop on the open standards issue. The change of position couldn't have come as a surprise to anybody who (like me) lives in the state. This is, after all, the place where recently the President of the state Senate and the leader of a successful local mob operation, the Winter Hill Gang, were brothers. The jury is still out on which one was the bigger crook.

If you're cynical enough (and in Massachusetts if you're breathing you're cynical enough) you can see a bagman behind every press statement and every policy flutter that wafts from Beacon Hill. So what do you suppose had Massachusetts politicians of every stripe lined up last week to sing the praises of Microsoft's recent moves to put a coat of open-standards paint on that most proprietary of products, Microsoft Office?

Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, is running for President, so he can't afford to have any major corporate interests mad at him, else how will he finance his campaign? Curiously, he had the outspoken support of two Democrats, Secretary of State William Galvin and influential state senator Marc Pacheco. But then, no bedfellows are stranger than those made by Massachusetts politics.

Tom Trimarco, the man who received IBM's letter, has recently been named Secretary of the state's department of Administration and Finance to replace Eric Kriss, who led the development of the OpenDocument policy that would have left Microsoft unable to sell software to the state. Trimarco led the cheering for Microsoft.

I believe Kriss and Peter Quinn, who supported him as director of the state's Informational Technology Division, were right: open document formats are what's best for the state and for computer users, and these days that's most of us. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, believes he'd like to be President. So Kriss is gone and Quinn is under investigation by Romney's administration and Microsoft looks like a sure bet to be a preferred provider of productivity software to Massachusetts state offices.

Looks to me like the cardinal rule of Massachusetts politics prevailed: Fattest envelope wins.