Since I began this blog in mid-June, less than two months ago, I have put up over 60 articles about OpenXML, going into considerable detail. So it is perhaps time to step back from the trees and look at the wood.
The purpose of a standard is to standardize - to establish a single way of doing something. This is generally of considerable benefit to users, because it allows them to use the products of any vendor. That is usually a prerequisite for competition. It can also benefit vendors, but not always. Indeed a dominant vendor often prefers a proprietary specification.
OpenXML is the latest MS file format for office documents. It has already been approved as a standard (Ecma 476) by the standards body Ecma International. “Office documents” is a well-defined area. It means documents that are intended to be printed, usually on regular office paper (A4 in Europe, Letter in the USA), and which are subject to editing. Once they have been finalized they can be “archived” in a different file format (usually pdf). Different standards are appropriate for archived documents, web documents and various more specialist categories.
Last year, ISO/IEC 26300 (popularly known as ODF or OpenDocument Format) was adopted as the ISO/IEC standard for office documents. ISO/IEC standards carry a particular prestige and uniqueness because ISO and IEC are intra-governmental bodies, so the standards are effectively government-endorsed standards. Not all important standards get this imprimatur. For example, in the internet software area most of the important standards are “W3C Recommendations”, and some ISO/IEC standards have flopped (failed to gain acceptance in the marketplace).
Attempts have been made over the last few months to argue that we need “competition in standards”. If you pause for thought, that is silly. Competition in standards is precisely the evil that standardization is designed to eliminate! Attempts have also been made to argue that OpenXML covers a different type of document from ODF. This argument is also totally bogus, see for example this article and many others on this site.
The first product using OpenXML, Office 2007, was only released this year, so it currently has only a modest market share. However, MS has over 95% of the market for office document software, so it is likely that OpenXML will become the overwhelmingly dominant format over the next few years.
95% market dominance is almost invariably an indication that competition is not working. Such extreme dominance is rarely sorted out by the market; it requires government action. In MS’s case this was recognized by the US government, which brought an anti-trust case. This established a consistent pattern of abuse by MS over a long period and also showed that MS had been able to “lock-in” customers by file formats and other devices. For reasons that have not yet been adequately explained, the incoming Bush administration decided to take no effective action against MS. A parallel case by the European Union has not yet been resolved.
In the meantime, the MS monopoly in office document software persists. A glance at the latest 10K shows that about a quarter of MS’s revenues come from such software and that the profit margins are extraordinary. An article on this site explains the peculiar characteristics of software that make this possible, and shows the serious scale of the problem.
Historically, MS has used proprietary “binary formats” for saving office documents. Apart from the anti-competitive effect, this has also meant that users have been forced to use MS software in order to access their own documents. This is clearly a highly unsatisfactory situation for governments and major businesses. This issue has been substantially ameliorated by the publication of Ecma 476 (the existing OpenXML standard). There is no doubt that the publication of this standard was a major benefit to users. Not because it is a standard, but because the specification has been put into the public domain and because MS’s freedom to change it arbitrarily has been reduced (although not by much, given the way Ecma seems to work).
It is certainly an unsatisfactory situation when the dominant vendor does not support the ISO/IEC standard. But adopting a second standard is not the answer. The answer is obvious: MS should adopt the existing ISO/IEC standard. It would also be highly desirable for governments to mandate the existing ISO/IEC standard for their own documents, in order to put pressure on MS to adopt it.
Of course, this prospect is highly unappealing to MS. It will be forced to incur some significant cost and will be opening the door to its competitors. I find it hard to be sympathetic. It chose to boycott the development of the ODF standard. It should suffer the consequences of its misjudgment.
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