Lost remembrances

On Sunday after my grandmother died, my family was sitting around and looking through my grandmother's books and pictures. One of the books was a baby book for her son who died when he was 18 months old. I believe this book was written in the 1920s. What was troubling to me was to project the experience into the future and to consider how things might be for people raised in the computer age.

As technology develops we put more and more of our life into digital form. Our writing, our pictures and now even our movies are all being created and stored in formats that are at best amorphous and at worst down right volatile. Many of these formats are proprietary and intimately tied to a particular piece of software on a particular platform. Now, let's step 70 years into the future and ask the question how do we access this information when our programs constantly change and vendors fight with each other for the holy grail of lock-in?

How as software consumers do we tolerate this? Software is here to help us manage our information, it is not here to own it. This question is especially relevant for our business leaders. Why do you accept this? You have the money, you choose the products to buy, why do you insist on allowing your vendors to bully you into proprietary solutions that insure lock-in to that solution. How can you be so flippant with the future of your company by tying your critical business information into formats that you don't control? It doesn't have to be that way. Computers are powerful now, we have ways of creating file formats that are rich as well as being open. It's time to insist on this from your vendors, insist that all software that you use has a native format that is at least readable using more then just the vendors tools. And for personal users, look carefully at the software you use. Ask the question of how will your family be able to remember you when your legacy is lost to the shallowness of greed by vendors with no ethics for protecting the value of what is, after all, your information.

The age of proprietary file formats must come to an end, it can do so, we have the technology. However, it won't do so until software users of all types make it loud and clear that they won't accept it anymore. We must aggressively ask this question of our software suppliers, "how are you going to protect my legacy?"

Posted by Kimbro Staken