OO - XML!

Microsoft Office has been one of the company’s two major cash cows over the past decade. While habituation and sales relationships are certainly important, it has been the Office file formats that have created tremendous switching costs and barriers to entry.

So Wednesday’s announcement that IOS has approved Microsoft’s current family of file formats (OOXML) could be a major milestone. Maybe. Possibly. Right now it’s an open question if the actual openness matches the nominal claims.

The decision would be significant if it reduces barriers to entry by rivals, who should now be able to read native Office documents without worry of incompatibility. Such alternatives should benefit (and fuel) reduced switching costs, and perhaps lower prices.

The problem is that a lot of cyberactivists think of open office formats as meaning favoring one particular project/product, OpenOffice.org. That’s not really choice and freedom, it’s just using public (or private) institutions to favor one actor over the other.

The real benefit will be if we see a proliferation of new products (free and commercial) that can read and write OOXML. It may be an ugly format, but open source libraries will make possible for innovators to reuse that commodity technology to create something new and valuable. Such open innovation would either improve the quality of the OOo libraries or perhaps lead to a new, cleaner implementation.

For me, the biggest benefit of an open standard would be the end to file format obsolescence. When I started my PhD career in 1994, I did a number of presentations in Macintosh Power Point 3. Office 98 read these files, but I can’t read them today on my computer using any of the OS X implementations — Office X, 2004 or 2008 (I dont recall whether it works in Office 2001).

So the idea that I can save portions of my life and read them 10, 20 or 30 years later is pretty important, and perhaps an open standard will assure that outcome. Through a combination of openness and market adoption, I know HTML, JPEG and TIFF files will be readable 30 years from now, but the odds seem lower on these semi-open file formats (like PDF and OOXML) that are deliberately revised every few years to sell software updates.

ODF en route to ANSI-dom

Catching up as I prepare to end the Grand Tour.

Quick update from last week: Microsoft says they will vote for the Open Document Format backed by Sun and IBM. A number of Microsoft critics see this as a dare: I’ll vote for yours (ODF), so you better vote for mine (OOXML).

IBM’s Bob Sutor — who apparently believes in monopoly standards rather than competing standards — sees efforts to provide choice as anti-consumer:

I believe the industry wants a common set of the fewest possible non-overlapping standards, and then a large choice of applications that use those standards. An analogy: I don’t want lots of standards for electrical wires and plugs in my house, I want a few standards and then a huge choice of electrical appliances. Microsoft is deliberately trying to confuse the industry and its customers with this bizarre and self-serving “choice of standards” argument, in my opinion.

I believe we need convergence of document standards. I would welcome Microsoft’s active and honest participation in further advancing the OpenDocument Format by adding its requirements and expertise.

Andy Updegrove — who helps Microsoft rivals put together standards consortia — is equally critical:

By issuing this press release, Microsoft is therefore making it appear that it is rising above the squabble to do the right thing, and therefore setting the stage to make IBM, Sun, or anyone else that supports ODF look bad if they later vote against OOXML when/if it comes around. …

The press release also fits within the overall spin that Microsoft adopted a few months ago, first presented by Microsoft Office Program Manager Brian Jones' blog, in which he announced that it had become clear that we have "two winners" in the fomat contest - OOXML and ODF.

He also remarks on the timing of the Microsoft announcement, soon after Microsoft counsel Brad Smith claimed that ODF infringes Microsoft’s patents:

For the first time (that I'm aware of), Microsoft started talking in the Fortune piece about a specific number of patents – 45 – that it claims OpenOffice (and presumably any other implementation of ODF) would infringe. So on the one hand, Microsoft is saying "Nice standard you've got there," while on the other hand, warning "Implement it if you dare, but only for a price."

(The executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin, responded Friday to Microsoft’s patent allegations.)

Sutor, Updegrove and (to a lesser degree) Zemlin seem critical of Microsoft for doing what it’s in the best interest of shareholders, and trying to forestall the commoditization of software. I can’t go that far, and my main agreement is with a throwaway subordinate clause in Sutor’s attack:

The longer Microsoft continues this charade of OOXML being an independent open standard rather than its actually just being an XMLification of their proprietary product data formats …

It does seem as though codifying a proprietary format — one that competitors will never be able to fully implement — is not what an “open” standard is about. So in this regard, I hope that ANSI votes down OOXML until (ala IETF policies) there is an independent implementation showing that this standard actually has some meaning for interoperability.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, ODF, OOXML, open standards, ANSI, XML

Some document standards more open than others

Most readers of this blog have already read about the ongoing fight about the Open Document Format, which is being led by two engineers who work on XML document formats at Sun’s OpenOffice.org group. The standard is being promulgated by OASIS, an industry consortium led by IBM and Sun, but many of the key technical issues have been discussed in open forums for more than four years.

Of course, this is aimed directly at the ubiquitous (and proprietary) .DOC (aka Microsoft Word) format that hold the overwhelming majority of the world’s formatted documents. The most visible aspect of the conflict was the attempt to get the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to adopt ODF by Peter Quinn, its CIO until the controversy forced him out (and then his successor) out last year.

The various conflicts around Microsoft have been well covered by ODF supporters in special sections on Groklaw, Andy Updegrove’s blog, and the blog of IBM’s Bob Sutor. The bible of enterprise IT, Computerworld, has also given it frequent coverage.

The story surfaced on Easter Sunday in (of all places) the International Herald Tribune, the pre-Internet bible of American expats in Europe (and now a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Gray Lady herself). The story noted that while the ODF became an ISO standard nearly a year ago, Microsoft has proposed its own XML schema for ISO standardization, called Office Open XML. The OOXML is already standardized by ECMA, a Microsoft-friendly ISO-partner trade association that previously blessed Microsoft’s C# language.

Clearly the competition from ODF (as with other competition) is forcing Microsoft to be more responsive to the needs of customers and complementors, after more than a decade of a completely secret proprietary file format. Microsoft acknowledged the importance of file interoperability in its announcement last year of OOXML for Office 2007.

The criticisms of Microsoft’s ISO application seem to be twofold. First, if the world already has an ISO standard for office documents based on XML, why does it need a second? I suppose Microsoft’s argument is that ODF is controlled by its major competitors and they are designed to make its life difficult. Of course, Microsoft could have joined the ODF technical committee, but (like IBM in its day) would prefer to continue to control its own proprietary standard rather than accelerate adoption of a (low-switching cost) open standard.

Technorati Tags: ISO, Microsoft, ODF, OOXML, open standards, XML