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    <title>FSFE - Questions for Microsoft on open formats</title>
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    <h1>Questions for Microsoft on open formats</h1>

    <p>
      Originally published on BBC, 2007 July 11th.
    </p>

    <p>
      After Microsoft announced it would work with the UK National Archives to
      help open old digital document formats, Georg Greve and Joachim Jakobs,
      of the Free Software Foundation Europe, question the US giant's motives.
    </p>

    <p> 
      Today's customers drive the technological development of tomorrow. This
      insight is common sense.
    </p>

    <p> 
      But when the same customers pay one and the same company for first
      creating a problem and then pay them again for solving that problem, most
      people would expect the customer to be dissatisfied. Although, at least
      some people seem to be pleased.
    </p>

    <p> 
      The problem: Microsoft dominates the desktop and office market
      with a share of more than 90%. Any document stored in their proprietary
      binary formats and especially every document shared between multiple
      people strengthens the monopoly and harms competition, economy and
      society as a whole.
    </p>

    <p>
      The more widely these formats are being used, the higher the network
      effect forcing others into the same dependency - just as it happened to
      the UK National Archives.
    </p>
     
    <p>
      What happened: Microsoft asked the UK National Archives to invest
      in a solution that would grant access to their legacy data.
    </p>

    <p>
      Only last week BBC News reported on Mr. Gordon Frazer, managing director
      of Microsoft UK, who voiced concern that customers could lose their own
      data: "Unless more work is done to ensure legacy file formats can be read
      and edited in the future, we face a digital dark hole."
    </p>

    <h3>Honest statement</h3>

    <p>
      This is a surprisingly honest statement from a company that is the
      largest provider of incompatible and undocumented legacy file formats in
      the world.
    </p>
    
    <p>
      The best solution Microsoft can apparently offer is to "emulate" the old
      versions of Windows under the current version of Windows Vista.
    </p>

    <p>
      Indeed some libraries and museums may want to offer an idea of the
      previous ages of computing, and not all of them may want to offer the
      fully authentic experience of running it on the old hardware to get the
      original "look and feel" of bygone times.
    </p>

    <p>
      But are the UK National Archives primarily a museum dedicated to
      preserving the original experience of ages and technologies long past? Or
      are they focused on archiving the knowledge, thoughts and ideas of the
      generations we build upon?
    </p>

    <p>
      The broad audience may not want to read Caesar in the hand writing of a
      particular scribe on the original clay tablets or skin.
    </p>

    <p>
      Images of them would normally be sufficient, although indeed most people
      would prefer a transcription on paper or screen may be sufficient.
    </p>

    <h3>Good translation</h3>

    <p>
      Even more people are probably served best with a good translation. File
      formats are the equivalent of the transcription, they encode the original
      writing into a form for storage.
    </p>

    <p>
      This idea is not new. Humankind has always sought to preserve its
      knowledge, as is documented by clay tablets, scrolls and cave paintings
      of ages long past.
    </p>

    <p>
      But while the storage medium can last for a very long time, sometimes the
      meaning is lost because the key to the information is lost.
    </p>

    <p>
      In modern terms: We no longer know the encoding used for the cave
      paintings.
    </p>

    <p>
      Digital information could potentially be stored without loss of quality
      for a very long time to come.
    </p>


    <p>
      But without knowledge about the encoding, our documents will become a
      meaningless series of ones and zeroes to future generations, just like
      cave paintings are too often meaningless bits of colour on stone to us.
    </p>

    <p>
      The best way to preserve the encoding is to spread it as far as possible,
      to make it a public good that is preserved with the same or higher
      diligence than the encoded information itself.
    </p>

    <p>
      At best, there is currently only one company that knows exactly how it
      has implemented its proprietary legacy file formats.
    </p>

    <p>
      If Microsoft had used Open Standards from the moment it was founded in
      1975, this problem would not exist.
    </p>

    <p>
      In fact, the users of GNOME Office, Koffice or OpenOffice.org would have
      no problems reading documents written by users of Microsoft (MS) Office.
    </p>

    <p>
      As it is, the stability of the encoding completely depends on the future
      existence and behaviour of one company.
    </p>

    <p>
      Thanks to the co-operation of many companies that find themselves in
      strong competition, but understand the necessity of preserving the
      encoding, there is an Open Standard for office documents: the
      "OpenDocument format" (ODF), which is maintained and further developed by
      OASIS, an international e-business standardisation organisation, and has
      been certified by the International Organisation for Standardization
      (ISO).
    </p>

    <h3>Serious doubts</h3>

    <p>
      Microsoft has said it has its own open format, called MS-OOXML. But there
      are serious doubts whether MS-OOXML can be considered an Open Standard:
      Like a Russian doll, it wraps a number of legacy formats like "Word95" or
      "Word6", which are not publicly available and can only be implemented by
      Microsoft.
    </p>

    <p>
      Another issue is that OOXML may be subject to patent claims. Ultimately
      the development of the format depends completely on the future existence
      of one company. Can we bet our future on Microsoft to exist in 4007?
    </p>

    <p>
      The impact of such dual standards was recently explained by Open Forum
      Europe, a business association with members such as Fujitsu Siemens,
      Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel, Novell and Sun.
    </p>

    <p>
      Their conclusion was to back ODF: "Multiple Open standards in the area of
      Interoperability are unwelcome, costly and impractical for both users and
      suppliers, and will be rejected by the market."
    </p>

    <p>

      The public needs to understand: As long as only Microsoft can write
      software that will be able to make use of the full extent of the
      predominant office file format, Microsoft will remain the predominant
      vendor for lack of alternatives and competition.
    </p>

    <p>
      In order to make MS-OOXML the predominant file format, Microsoft is now
      seeking approval through ISO for its format, expecting its market
      dominance and global lobbying efforts to coerce a sufficient amount of
      national standardisation bodies into approving MS-OOXML at ISO.
    </p>


    <p>
      We have laid down six questions we want Microsoft to answer - but the key
      one is this: Why did and does Microsoft refuse to participate in the
      existing standardisation effort?
    </p>

    <h2>Related reading</h2>

    <ul>
      <li><a href="/documents/msooxml-interoperability.html">Interoperability woes with MS-OOXML</a></li>
      <li><a href="/documents/msooxml-idiosyncrasies.html">DIS-29500: Deprecated before use?</a></li>
      <li><a href="/documents/msooxml-questions.html">Six questions to national standardisation bodies</a></li>
      <li><a href="/documents/msooxml-converter-hoax.html">The Converter Hoax</a></li>
    </ul>
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