Microsoft is releasing it's Office format

Microsoft is public releasing the format of it's Office product line. Now people can create their own word processors that are compatible with Microsoft products without having to try to reverse engineer the formatting. Microsoft has long kept it's format secret to prevent competitors (OpenOffice) from successfully creating office productivity that were fully compatible. Refer to my Oct. 19 post that links to an written on Sept. 2005 predicting the the doom of Microsoft if they did not open up their format because the EU could force all it's countries to use Open Document Format.

The [European Union] Commission is eager to promote e-government services, but is concerned about access to public documents created in proprietary formats such as Microsoft Office. It is keen to ensure that all EU citizens are able to access electronic government documents without being obliged to buy a specific company’s software.

Had Microsoft failed to act on the issue, the Commission could have stopped using Microsoft Office for the creation of public documents and advised all 25 national governments in the European Union to do the same.

People trump process, and politics trump people

I don't remember when Boehm said this but he said recently in lecture that people trump process, but politicis trump people. In other words having good people in your company is more important than having a good process model. (People trump process.) But good people can be prevented from doing good work by office politics. (Politics trump people.)

I was thinking about this and it occurred to me that office politics has a lot to do with how the reward structure is organized in a company which is very related to process.

However if I think the bottom line is that you can over optimize your process model. You just have to optimize to the point where it is good enough. Having good programmers should be the focus point. To tie it in with framework that Boehm mentioned about people trumping process and politics trumping people, you just have to get your process mature enough that the politics stop trumping the people. Stated another way, your process has to be good enough so that programmers can do their job.

Alternative viewpoint reference:
Joel Spolsky has something interesting to say related to this. He says that if you build a company where good programmers want to work, they will come. And through having good programmers at your company you will have good software and ultimately be profitable. Best place I could find where he talks about this is in his article title "Converting Capital into Software that Works". I seem to remember there being a better article somewhere though that even has a figure or something like that.