Microsoft bows to Mass. with open records format

A Microsoft Corp. executive said yesterday that his company's new office software will comply with a disputed Massachusetts government mandate requiring the use of ''open" data formats.

But Massachusetts' chief information officer, Peter Quinn, who's leading the drive for the new data standard, said the Microsoft proposal will probably meet the state's demands.

The Massachusetts standard, which takes effect Jan. 1, 2007, has attracted worldwide attention because it poses a major challenge to Microsoft Office, by far the world's most popular office software program. Up to now, Microsoft Office has used data formats that are not fully compatible with office software from other companies. Quinn has called for an open standard for files generated by 50,000 computers used in the state's executive branch. Quinn said this policy would let state workers use different brands of software, and ensure that state documents would be readable for many years into the future.

Quinn plans to adopt the OpenDocument Format, a standard created by a number of major companies, including Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM Corp., and there have been questions about whether Microsoft products would be excluded from future state work. But in a forum held yesterday at the State House, Alan Yates, general manager of Microsoft's Information Worker business unit, said the 2007 version of Microsoft Office will have an open file format, called Open XML.

Microsoft recently said it will submit Open XML to a standards group in Switzerland, called Ecma International, to have it certified as a fully open standard. Once this is done, Yates said, any other software company will be free to make its products compatible with Open XML.

So what's new and different about the MS approach this time? XML is XML -- it's just a wrapper around the data which counts -- if the underlying data is still in a secret binary format, you won't win any converts by merely "switching to XML". I see the "licensing issue" as little more than a wookie to divert attention from the XML/data format issue.

And now along comes Alan Yates with more comments which demonstrate that MS still doesn't get it.

What I'm really going to be talking about is Massachusetts actually opening up to more choice and more competition than the current policy has. That's, I think that's the fundamental decision that's before us. Can Massachusetts open up to more choice, additional standards, in order to enable greater value over a period of time? And by doing that, by enabling more choice over a period of time, you avoid the industry warfare that tends to jerk governments around from one month to the next month, to one debate to the next debate to the next debate.

Hah? The focus of the state's decision is the value of having document data available over the long term, without compatibility issues or single-vendor lock-in. How does MS propose to help with that problem?

Next, public policy shouldn't necessarily favor one business model over another. Commercial software can be quite, quite, quite open, just as Open Source software can be quite open. They're simply different business models. One business model relies more on the magic of software, if you will, and one business model relies more on the magic of services, if you will, gluing disparate parts together through professional services to make it all work together. Two different business models. Governments should be open to both and to whatever else rolls down the street next. And by essentially enabling more choice, more competition like this, we feel that you avoid creating problems that sort of more narrow choices, uh, create problems like additional cost, problems like conversion cost, problems like one product may not have the accessibility features that another product may have, etc. So, again, my message is to open up to more choice.

The public policy is to go with a standard. It says nothing about which tools to use, which business process to follow. How does MS' suggestion to "open up" to "choice" and "competition" actually save the state money and labor?

I will say that we've been very gratified by the positive reception to our recent announcement of moving the Office OpenXML formats into a standards organizations, ECMA International, to make them utterly, completely, perpetually open by any measurement of openness at that point.

Last I heard, ECMA will not be able to actually change anything, only to approve or reject, and it doesn't look likely to reject. ECMA's process of putting the cart before the horse seems guaranteed to work; that's why MS is using it. When it's done, MS will have a new "standard" to wave under the state's nose and the politicians to strong-arm the state into using it.

Competition between standards, we believe, is a very good thing in this rapidly evolving area of technology...

Tell that to Tom Edison and George Westinghouse.

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