Fifteen Microsoft Pages
My readers may have grown weary of the Massachusetts office-document-format story, but the story persists in developing. Last week, Microsoft (among others) filed a fifteen-page response (hmm, Microsoft’s original PDF was actually more readable, but seems to have vanished). I was unable to restrain myself from spending some quality time with this document; the points it raises are serious and deserve examination.
Meta-Debate · Before one dives too deep into the bowels of any argument, it’s helpful, essential actually, to understand why the argument is happening what the participants are trying to achieve. In this case, the meta-argument is really easy to understand. Massachusetts wants 100% ownership of its own public documents, with no-one else having any claim on them. Any public administration that isn’t pursuing such a policy is not serving its constituents well. Microsoft wants to protect a very nice line of business, 7.915 billion profit on $11.013 billion in revenues in the most recent fiscal year. Any management team that doesn’t go to almost any lengths to protect such a profit stream is not serving its shareholders well.
The Big Issue · If Microsoft were, in its Office product suite, to support the Open Document Format, this issue would dry up and blow away, and they could compete for the future Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and they could expect to win a lot of that business, because after all, Microsoft Office is a good product. Microsoft never addresses this issue directly, but does argue that:
ODF wouldn’t support the “billions of existing documents”. Further, “There are billions of documents that we are going to help move into our new XML formats, and so a key constraint on all of our efforts was that these new formats had to support all those existing files and features with absolutely no loss.”
It would be hard: “incorporating native conformance for the OpenDocument format, as required by the proposed policy, would be enormous and time consuming”
Let’s dismiss the second issue first: Microsoft, with its billions in the bank and legions of programmers, could support ODF easily, should it choose.
The “billions of documents” issue is engrossing. Microsoft points out correctly that transitioning this legacy from obsolete, proprietary data formats will be expensive and difficult. In fact, the cost of such conversions is one of the reasons for the continuing remarkable profit margins Microsoft enjoys in this area. The obvious conclusion, surely, would be to avoid digging deeper into this hole and avoid creating billions more documents that will stand in the way of the inevitable migration to truly open, nonproprietary formats.
Finally, and most important, should Microsoft decide to support ODF, they would obviously have a huge competitive advantage in their capacity to transition this document legacy to the new format; it is hard to believe that anyone could do as good a job. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Microsoft prefers data-format-based lock-in to competing in the market, even when they have an advantageous position.
The Process Issue · Microsoft argues that Massachusetts’ policy proposal “runs afoul of well-established procurement norms”, and that “it is also possible that the proposed policy violates applicable Commonwealth statutes”. These are issues for the Commonwealth to address, but one assumes they have taken legal advice in a matter this visible.
Second, Microsoft points out, rather angrily, that Massachusetts earlier signaled that they would treat the Office 12 format as an acceptable option, but has now changed their mind. I’m quite certain that if the decision had changed in the other direction, Microsoft could contain their feelings.
The PDF Issue · Microsoft points out that Massachusetts proposes to bless the use of PDF, which, they state, is proprietary to Adobe; and thus that it is inconsistent to rule against the Office 12 XML formats.
This objection fails on three grounds:
PDF is so entrenched, and has a surrounding ecosystem so large, that Adobe would be unlikely to be able to change it even if they wanted to.
As Adobe points out, PDF is in fact at least partially standardized by ISO.
While a more standardized version might be desirable, in fact there is a distinct lack, in the marketplace, of credible alternatives to fill the role played by PDF.
The Data Integration Issue · Microsoft points out (correctly) that their product suite offers facilities for integrating Office-XML documents with data-centric applications. This argument contains some classic Fear-Uncertainty-and-Doubt language: “Data may be lost as it is entered into documents...” On the other hand, there are no architectural barriers to developing similar capabilities around ODF data, and further, Microsoft would probably be better-equipped to build them than any other technology provider.
In any case, this is an argument around current product capabilities, not data format issues, and is thus not really material.
The Multimedia Issue · Microsoft claims that the ODF has unsatisfactory facilities for multimedia integration: “Modern documents need to be able to handle embedded pictures, audio, video, maps, voice, data, database schema, web pages, and other data types.”
I am somewhat puzzled: the software products I’ve used that are based on ODF’s OpenOffice.org predecessor handle multimedia just fine. But let’s grant Microsoft’s points, and stipulate that by standardizing on ODF, Massachusetts might limit its ability to use some advanced multimedia and data-integration capabilities. I would argue that the benefits of open, nonproprietary, unencumbered data formats are sufficient to make up for some loss of functionality.
The Maturity Issue · Microsoft argues that ODF is not ready for prime time: “an immature and untested open format”; and further, that since ODF is going to be submitted to ISO, which might change it.
While ODF is fairly new, it is based closely on the OpenOffice.org XML file formats, which are five years old, and in wide production use around the world. The claim that ODF is unproven is simply incorrect.
The ISO concern betrays a lack of understanding of the standardization process; OASIS, the host organization for ODF, enjoys “PAS” status at ISO, whereby its standards can be fast-tracked through to ISO-standard status with the assumption that there will be little or no significant change.
The Intellectual-Property Issue · Microsoft claims that their proprietary XML formats are entirely legally unencumbered, and the licensing basis more or less equivalent to that offered for the Open Document Format. They note that they formats have been “reviewed and endorsed by the European Union’s Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA), a key technology committee from the EU”—they should also note that the IDA strongly criticized Microsoft for neither submitting their data formats to a standards committee, nor becoming active in the OASIS ODF working group.
I am not a lawyer, but the Free Software community has already asserted that certain conditions in the Microsoft license will make it impossible for GPL-licensed software to support it; clearly an unacceptably situation in today’s software marketplace.
Furthermore, the Microsoft legal terms seem to bar software from doing any subsetting of the Microsoft data formats, or to processing documents which are only in partial conformance. It is difficult to see how one could construct editing or revision software which would not from time to time have to deal with documents which are at least temporarily in a non-conformant state.
Finally, the Microsoft language which explicitly blesses software when used in read-only mode for government documents has to raise concern about the legal liabilities possibly attached to the use of software which fails to meet these conditions.
Finally, Microsoft entirely declines to reveal which, if any, of their patents may apply to their XML file formats. It is entirely possible that Microsoft in fact has no defensible intellectual-property rights whatever.
The Competitive-Landscape Issue · Microsoft criticizes the ODF on the basis that the committee which designed it had two representatives from Sun and two from IBM and was thus “small and parochial”. This is really disingenuous; the TC had substantial contributions from the academic community and user groups.
Having said that, it has historically been the case that Microsoft has often had poor results in the context of standards processes. The company’s insular and aggressive culture makes it very difficult to work with. Microsoft representatives to Working Groups have tended not to engage in actual dialogue, but to bring forth pre-cooked Microsoft positions which they defend in their entirety; this has often led to reasonable Microsoft ideas being voted down in part because of lack of ability to negotiate constructively.
The Credibility Issue · The Microsoft paper includes a number of statements which are unsupported by evidence, run counter to common sense, or are simply demonstrably false. A reasonable reader would have good reason to feel that these cast some shadow on the credibility of the document as a whole.
1 "effectively requires the deployment of a single office application technology" 1 "prevents impacted state agencies... from using many critical and well-established technologies" 2 bullet points (ii) and (v) 5 all of Heading "2." 7 "more innovative software than the choice designated in the proposal" - but no SW is designated! 8 "all implementations are "slight variations of the same codebase" - wrong
