The Art of Saying Sorry - Openly

Interesting piece in Forbes about CEOs learning to eat crow and enjoy it. Take Facebook's Zuckerberg, for example:

When Zuckerberg's apology surfaced, the protest's 70,000 or so privacy advocates still represented a relatively small seed of revolt--less than .2% of Facebook's 50 million plus members. Facebook's apology and changes to Beacon seem to have appeased that angry minority before it could swallow up the site.

That such a small group could pull a contrite message out of a chief executive also shows just how the Web can channel consumers' anger. And tech companies may be especially prone to those backlashes: Not only are tech customers particularly Web savvy, but the tech industry itself frequently sails into uncharted and--from a PR perspective--dangerous waters, says Waggener Edstrom's Neptune.

I think that much of this is due to the Internet culture, which is pretty much the same as that of the free software world. It's one that requires transparency and accountability; and when either of those is missing, it also requires apologies. Remember:

The people are the heroes now, behemoth pulls the peasants’ plow

The Behemoth Bends to ODF

Wow: it looks like Microsoft has finally admitted that ODF is now too big to ignore. According to the C|net story:

Microsoft said it plans to sponsor an open-source project to create software that will convert Office documents to OpenDocument, a rival format gaining ground, particularly among governments.

The software giant on Thursday is expected to launch the Open XML Translator project on SourceForge.net, a popular site for hosting code-sharing projects that use the BSD open-source license.

The software, developed by a France-based Microsoft partner, will allow people to use Microsoft Office to open and save documents in the OpenDocument, or ODF, format.

Open source, too.

This is big, not least because it indicates that ODF is now strong enough to bend even the mighty behemoth.