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 As you would expect in this day and age, I use my computer to keep track of my financial assets. Like a lot of people, I adopted Intuit’s Quicken package and used it happily for many years. I was disconcerted when Intuit decided to stop supporting Quicken in the UK in January 2006, but I continue to use Quicken XG 2004 as it still works and indeed still (albeit intermittently) updates stock prices across the Internet. Nevertheless I did start looking for alternatives, and was further disconcerted to find that Microsoft now regards its Money 2005 package as ‘legacy software’ and unlikely to be updated for the UK market.
Both Intuit and Microsoft do of course have every right to make such decisions, although I do wonder why both have decided to withdraw from the personal accounting market in the UK, particularly as Microsoft Money Plus has recently released in the US where it competes with Quicken Deluxe 2008.
What this brought home to me was the vulnerability of my personal accounts. Without this software I would not be able to access the data. Yes, Quicken XG 2004 does support Quicken Interchange Format (QIF), which is an open format in that Quicken does publish full documentation, but QIF is not Quicken’s native file format and is not managed by an independent standards body.
I also read with interest the blog of HardCopy contributor Tim Anderson at www.itwriting.com entitled ‘Amazon, eBay, FaceBook: the risk of building your business on a third-party platform’. Here Tim notes the problems that developers face when these companies change the way their platforms work, either technically or financially. It’s an age-old problem. I remember having similar discussions a decade ago with small software companies who were building components and add-ins for Visual Basic, and lived in constant fear of Microsoft making them redundant when changing the feature set of the next version.
I was therefore relieved when the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) finally accepted Office Open XML (OOXML), the XML-based file format introduced with Microsoft Office 2007, as a standard, despite strong opposition from the Open Document Format (ODF) lobby.
There must be many millions or even billions of Word and Excel documents held by organisations and government bodies throughout the world that are now, at last, no longer reliant on a particular version of Microsoft Office to render them accurately on screen or paper. Although it does have teething troubles, OOXML means that owners of documents created with most versions of Office over the last decade are no longer vulnerable to the business decisions of one particular company, which can only be a good thing.
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