Question: How is ODF like Web 2.0?

Answer: ODF (Open Document Format) represents the next battleground in corporate computing. If you have paid any attention to Tim O'Reilly's discussion of the characteristics of Web 2.0, you'll see that he characterizes the next mode of competition moving from control of software to control of data (see here for his discussion about the control of data, which he describes as the next "Intel Inside").

Much to Microsoft's chagrin, it's obvious that a significant part of the potential customer base is refusing to be locked in at the product level -- thus the interest in the Linux desktop and OpenOffice.

However, Microsoft realizes (as do most forward-looking observers of technology trends), the application is only relevant as a way to create, store, and manipulate data. And that data is, increasingly, becoming something well beyond a self-contained document.

Data is now becoming a separate entity that is acted upon in a variety of ways: on my laptop in a spreadsheet, by my ERP system as it processes transactions, as an externally accessed customer portal, served up as an SOA payload, etc. In other words, data is increasingly becoming the central aspect of a company's operation, with the different systems merely being windows through which to view the data. The key to accomplish this, is, of course, putting the data into a format accessible by any system. The solution fastened upon by the entire industry is XML, which makes data easy to slice and dice.

Data is the new "Intel Inside," according to O'Reilly, because it puts a company like Google or Amazon which can control the data and access to it in a position to charge outside "rents" (in economic terms) to use the data. "Intel Inside" was, of course, Intel's brand exercise that allowed it to reap enormous margins for the CPUs hidden inside someone else's product.

Of course, corporate data is owned by individual companies, not a central entity like Google or Amazon, so the Web 2.0 analogy is misplaced -- or is it?

While corporate data is placed among thousands of different organizations, each with its own pot of information, it's obvious that defining the format that each of those organizations is critical, because the format dictates how applications may access the data. And here is how ODF and Web 2.0

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