Information Always Outlives Technology

Nice to see Sun's boss-man getting it about both open standards and ODF:

Imagine you're a legislator that writes a law, or a doctor that drafts a patient's record, or a student that writes a novel. And that five years or fifty years from now, you want to return to review your documents. Except the vendor that created the application used to draft those documents, the company that created the word processor, has either gone out of business, or decided to charge you $10,000 for a version capable of reading old file formats. Either scenario makes the point: Information always outlives technology.

As I've said elsewhere, I really think that the ODF bandwagon is chugging away unstoppably now, and that 2007 will be the year not of the GNU/Linux desktop, but of OpenOffice.org on the desktop. Schwartz's post is further evidence of that.