Microsoft rarely fails to respond to market pressures, although its response usually manages to be one step forward for customers, and two for themselves. Its press briefing (22/11) that it intends to open up access to some Microsoft Office XML file formats was a good example of this approach.

The past year has seen a rapid growth in understanding in the marketplace of the importance of office file formats. Traditionally, if you asked an IT director to point to the organisation’s investment in office software, they would have pointed to the stack of Microsoft Office licences in the fireproof safe. Now, they will point to file servers full of office files – spreadsheets, documents, databases, presentations. This is where the organisation’s real investment, its intellectual property lies – not in IT’s investment in software, but in the business’s investment in what they have done with the software.

This investment has always caused problems to IT, such as the difficulty of sharing data between ‘big IT’ and ‘end user computing’. A new and business-critical issue is increasingly stringent governance: Freedom of Information, Sarbanes-Oxley, and similar requirements are hitting organisations across the board from public administrations to major corporations. Organisations are forced to demonstrate they will be able to access their office files on a long term basis, over the next decade or beyond. In IT, these are unimaginably long timescales, representing several generations of technology development. How many VisiCalc spreadsheets or Multimate documents can you access today?

So, IT is facing two business requirements – the ability to use office documents from any application, and the guarantee of long term access to data. Both of these can be met by the adoption of vendor-neutral open-standards for office documents. ‘Open’ is one of the most misused words in IT vendor literature – in this context it means:

• the file formats and any associated trademarks, logos, etc should be owned, published, and maintained by a vendor-neutral standards body
• any contributor to the standards must waive any patent or other IPR claims to their contributions in perpetuity
• the formats should be usable without encumbrances by any software released either under proprietary or open-source licences

Ideally, there should also be independent compliance testing facilities to certify software compliance with the standard.

As has often happened in the past, Microsoft has initially been reluctant to respond to this demand for vendor-neutral open-standards. Microsoft has rarely published its default Office file formats, and indeed its strategic direction had been to try and restrict access even further. One feature of its ‘secure computing initiative’ promised to give organisations control over access to data (one step forward for customers) but at the cost of total dependence on Microsoft (two steps forward for Microsoft).

This conflict between customers’ desire for open-standards and Microsoft’s desire for complete lock-in has created an inevitable ‘whose data is it anyway’ backlash among customers. The much-publicised decision by the US State of Massachusetts to refuse to accept Microsoft Office formats for storing office documents is the most visible example to date of this response, and the most worrying for Microsoft.

Microsoft’s competitors have been keen to capitalise on this growing gap between the market’s needs and Microsoft’s strategy. In May this year OASIS published the OpenDocument format, a set of open standards for holding office documents, spreadsheets, drawings, and databases in XML format. OASIS’s pedigree is tailor-made for the task – it is the standards body for XML formats in business, and its sponsors include all the great and the good in IT (including Microsoft). The OpenDocument format meets the three criteria for a vendor-neutral open-standard (although there is no compliance certification body as yet). In September OASIS went on to submit the OpenDocument specification for approval as an ISO standard.

Sun Microsystems and the other sponsors of the free OpenOffice.org software then tightened the screws further on Microsoft by releasing version 2.0 of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite in October. Not only did OpenOffice.org 2.0 use OpenDocument as its default file format; it also offered an exceptionally high degree of compatibility with current Microsoft Office files. At a stroke, this demonstrated that OpenDocument was not just a paper exercise, but could also be used in real applications to store the full gamut of office documents. This was further confirmed this month with the announcement that Writely.com had successfully implemented OpenDocument formats in a completely different class of application, a web-hosted word processor.

Microsoft’s press briefing this week shows that it has decided the pressure needs a response. As the dominant supplier of office software, Microsoft is in a unique position to attempt to impose its own standard on the marketplace. Its proposals for publishing some of its Microsoft Office 2003 XML file formats through ECMA are still sketchy, but currently fall well short of the three requirements for a fully vendor-neutral open-standard implementation. Microsoft has also been vague about timescales, suggesting it wants to wait and see whether this announcement is enough in itself to deflect the demand for genuine vendor-neutral open-standard file formats.

From an industry perspective, universal adoption of a vendor-neutral open-standard for office file formats would be a huge win for users and vendors alike. Web standards such as html and latterly xml have shown how standards can be the catalyst for growth of an entire industry. However, what the industry does not need are multiple ‘standards’. IT decision-makers need to continue the pressure on Microsoft to adopt vendor-neutral open-standard file formats. The onus currently is on Microsoft to demonstrate why this should not be OpenDocument. OpenDocument meets users’ needs – however, it is always going to struggle without endorsement from the market leader. Microsoft has grown immensely rich from the IT industry – is it now prepared to show responsible leadership and take a step for the greater good of the industry as a whole?