November 4th, 2005
Microsoft and special consideration
It’s a beautiful day in Geneva. Flowers are in full bloom, young toughs play their boom-boxes quietly so as not to disturb passersby, and 800 year old buildings look like they were built yesterday due to Swiss obsessive attention to repairs. Lake Geneva glistens beneath a cloudless sky, and sailboats criss-cross with carefree abandon a lake completely bounded by Alpine peaks.
A UN committee has spent the past year deciding on a standard language. Its expensive to maintain documents in multiple languages. Besides, the UN worries that in 500 years the documents may be as incomprehensible as Old English is to modern speakers of English. They want something that will stand the test of time.
The results are about to be announced. In a conference room at the Hotel Metropole, the representative from Lithuania (who chaired this committee) gets up, takes one last sip of coffee, clears his throat, and smiles at the cameras as he announces that the language they chose was…
Yes, Esperanto. The crowd seems puzzled.
A reporter from 24 heures, a Lausanne-based newspaper, notes sheepishly that the language is spoken by only a small fraction of the world’s population, and none of them do so natively. "Yes, yes," says the representative from Lithuania, "but Esperanto is better! It’s not subject to control by any one culture or nation. All control it, and no one does. It is well-defined, and gosh darn it, the real world is just too messy to be an adequate source for a language that will stand the test of time."
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Okay, I doubt the representative from Lithuania would say "gosh darn it." Even so, that fabricated press event encapsulates my reaction to Massachusetts’ decision to standardize on ODF, an XML document specification ratified in May of this year and used by practically nobody.
Here’s why.
Microsoft is the entity that pretty much created the modern office tools market. No, they were not the first to make word processing software, or a spreadsheet product, or presentation writing software, or a graphical database tool. However, their efforts have had more to do with the evolution of the Office experience over the past 10 years than any of the software packages that preceded or coexisted with it. They were the first to embrace a windowed Word Processing tool (WordPerfect’s reluctance to embrace the Windows platform is often cited as a reason Word beat WordPerfect in the court of public opinion), and they offered graphical features to their spreadsheet long before Lotus 1-2-3, the former market leader, responded. Their dominance was EARNED, and their ability to maintain that dominance was also earned, unless you failed to learn the lesson of the defeat of WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3…which is that there is no such thing as unassailable dominance.
Fast forward to the present, and we see that the company that made these market-leading products has been told by a committee in Massachusetts that their knowledge of user needs and wants, given expression in a product that billions have chosen to use, doesn’t matter. Massachusetts knows more about office document formats than the company that has managed to convince BILLIONS to use its software to write…(drum roll please)…Office Document Formats!
Call me nuts, but is that chutzpah or what? Granted, Microsoft’s proposed Office XML Reference Schema is scheduled for release in product form with Office 12, but at least Microsoft is building on a lot more successful office product experience than the folks at ODF (only a handful of which have much experience with office document formats, and most of those were lapped several times by Microsoft’s Office efforts).
People have asked me to explain why I think Microsoft’s Office format should be given special consideration in decisions regarding acceptable document formats. Well, the explanation is simple: Microsoft is the vendor for most of the world’s office automation tools. Refusing to accept their formats is like refusing to offer English-language versions of a site which aims for a global audience (which isn’t a perfect analogy, as English is nowhere near as prevalent as Microsoft’s Office formats).
Should Massachusetts demand that others be able to read and write documents stored in Microsoft’s Office XML Reference Schema? Yes they should. I have no problem demanding that Microsoft’s formats be open so that third-parties can use it. My difficulties start with the notion that a STATE GOVERNMENT, a body which is supposed to be a FACILITATOR not a TREND SETTER, should try to reorder the software landscape in Massachusetts. Sorry, the argument that Microsoft’s Office XML Reference schema must be rejected because it is not a jointly-owned standard doesn’t hold much water for me, given that Massachusetts seemed perfectly willing to accept a format completely controlled by Adobe, as I explained in a previous post.
David Berlind’s motivation for backing ODF, in keeping with his opposition to DRM, appears to be his desire for an open format that everyone can read and write, something that would theoretically level the playing field for Office suites (though Microsoft’s Office XML Reference Schema IS open to third party implementation).
My motivation is that I want governments to respect the will of the marketplace, because the marketplace is SMARTER than a committee in Massachusetts. That doesn’t mean the people on the committee are dumb. It just means that committee members will have the same difficulty discerning the right solution for the market as central planners in the Soviet Union had in managing the market for shoes.
If an open document format such as ODF succeeds in the marketplace, then more power to it. At that point, governments would be right to stamp it with their approval. If an open format fails to gain traction, though, try to discern WHY the market may opt to reject an open (read: committee-controlled) standard.
There are limitations to an open specification process, a key element of which is the slow pace of technology evolution. Evolution in technical specifications matter unless everyone here can attest to the fact that innovation in Office products has ended, and there is no need to have anything new added to an Office document format. That means that the RIGHT answer may be a standard which is not controlled by a committee, but is owned by a private company with close contacts with real-world customers.
Markets, in the aggregate, could see that. Individuals, with their preferences and biases, might not. Either way, I trust the decisions of the aggregate over the decisions of the individual, and you should, too, because if the last 100 years of economic history has shown us anything, it is that market systems ARE rational.
Microsoft controls their own Office document formats, a format they have used in a product that has - and I don’t think this is an exaggeration - swept the computing world. Controlling their own format certainly gives them lots of flexibility, and it would appear that they have used that format to satisfy needs sufficiently well. Where is the argument for removing the format from their control, or are the merits of a shared document specification so patently obvious that no proof needs to be given? Where is the evidence that there are huge needs not satisfied due to Microsoft’s control over its own format?
I discussed on Wednesday why Microsoft should reject Korean attempts to redesign Windows, and in so doing defend the principle that private companies have the right to design their own software. Well, the Massachusetts decision is a symptom of the same disease, in my opinion, a disease characterized by a willingness at the government level to try to re-architect software markets. If ODF wants to become the standard used by most governments, then they need to WIN IN THE MARKETPLACE. This "monkey business" wherein private groups lobby governments incessantly to get government to do for them what they cannot do on their own is anti-market, and bad for consumers. This is NOT the way markets are supposed to work.
Since I happen to be a Microsoft employee, I’ll close by reminding everyone that this is MY OPINION, NOT Microsoft’s. So, get mad at me if you want.
End rant.
John Carroll has delivered his opinion on ZDNet since the last millennium. Since May 2008, he is no longer a Microsoft employee. He is currently working at a unified messaging-related startup. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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