Open Standards: Microsoft's Worst Enemy

Open Standards range from file formats to freely available APIs.

Consider the internet as a whole, there are 5 popular web browsers: Firefox, IE, Safari, Netscape, and Opera, and certain web pages can look very different in each one. Many sites actually "break" and loose functionality, aesthetics, and ultimately visitors, simply because they do not use the current standards available.

This is a good thing for Microsoft.

Microsoft is the only browser on that list that intentionally do not follow current web standards. Microsoft still has the market share necessary to convince web designers that their standard is better than the World Wide Web Consortium's. If Microsoft adhered to global web standards like most other browsers do, then there would be no reason for websites to work in one browser but not in another.

The same goes for their office suite.

There is a standard file format for office documents, collectively called OpenDocument, which is backed by OASIS Standards. OASIS stands for:

Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards

And if you look in recent history, many organizations, including the W3C, Mozilla, Sun Microsystems, Google, and others have been focusing more on Advancing Structured Information.

Microsoft has been working on Advancing Proprietary Information. Meaning the Microsoft Office documents you create may belong to you, but the format they are saved in belongs to Microsoft. Another way to think of this is You wrote the speech, but Microsoft owns the ink. This may entitle you to all the rights you care about, but what about other individuals who want to read your speech, and you want them to read it, but they don't own the license from Microsoft that allows them to view the ink? That means you need to provide it in a different format, or they don't get to read it.

This is exactly what Microsoft wants. They want to control the way you use, share, and distribute your document.

Your intellectual property should be supported by document types, not controlled by them.

OpenOffice.org, the free Office Suite sponsored by Sun Microsystems will use the OpenDocument standard from OASIS in version 2 of their product. I highly recommend moving to this office suite, as it is not only free, but it will be more compatible with a wider variety of software applications than Microsoft Office ever will be.

If you are in an office environment, consider requesting Sun's StarOffice for the entire office. Massachusetts has moved to OpenDocument format for all of their government agencies, and many countries across the globe have done the same.

Microsoft's proprietary formats were used to lock people in, but are now pushing them away, causing more groups to leave the buggy software package for a cheaper, more flexible, more reliable software package.

Here is a quick list of software manufacturers that are legally entitled to utilize all of the features of Microsoft Office Documents:

• Microsoft

Here is a list of software manufactures that are legally entitled to utilize all of the features of OpenDocument formatted Documents:

• EVERYONE

This includes Microsoft, Google, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Oracle, and all of your favorite developers. In fact, Billy, the 5 year old down the street, is legally entitled to write software that can take advantage of all OpenDocument features. (whether he can or not depends more on his personal drive and his bed-time than legal matters, which is a good thing!)

So if you intend on never sharing documents, and never getting documents from the entire state of Massachusetts, then by all means, use Microsoft Office. Otherwise, give OpenOffice.org a try. (after version 2.0 gets released, version 2 is the first version to utilize OpenDocument, and should be out in the next month or so)