Recently, the Massachusetts I.T. department has established a rule that documents are to be kept, transmitted and archived in an open format. The format they selected is the
Open Document Format, an international standard already supported by the OpenOffice (and therefore Sun Microsystems' StarOffice) sofware packages, as well as upcoming support from a variety of other software producers. However, Microsoft refuses to develop support for this wide-open, non-patent-encumbered format, despite being a member of the broader standards body (OASIS) that established the Open Document Format.
The statewide I.T. director who accepted responsibility for establishing an open government document policy, Peter Quinn, has resigned in frustration over the treatment he has received in response to his support of unencumbered I.T. policy.
Quoting from a CRN news website:
In an e-mail sent Christmas Eve to his Information Technology Division (ITD) staff, Peter Quinn, ITD director, wrote: "I have become a lightning rod with regard to any IT initiative. Even the smallest initiatives are being mitigated or stopped by some of the most unlikely and often uninformed parties."
ODF office software, which has its strongest corporate sponsors in IBM and Sun Microsystems, was pushed through against the protests of Microsoft, which complained that its format approach was being unfairly excluded by the state. Quinn had powerful support for his stance in the person of Eric Kriss, who was the state's secretary of Administration and Finance. But Kriss resigned a few months ago and was replaced by Tom Trimarco, who has already indicated he is favorably disposed to Microsoft's approach.
This is how our society treats people who violate the sacrosanct rule of private ownership of every resource. I believe the current controlling phrase is "the ownership society".
Microsoft has made billions through its essential ownership of the personal computer desktop. They leveraged their near monopoly back in the MS-DOS days into a near monopoly in Office Productivity software during the decade of the 1990's. Since then, they have used their considerable resources to preserve their hold on the marketplace.
Peter Quinn's goal in Massachusetts was "merely" to require public Commonwealth documents to be stored and transmitted in a format that is not owned by a single profit-making entity. Naturally, Microsoft does not want to lose its near monopoly control over the office productivity market and opposes the move toward an open format.
Early in December, a reporter for the Boston Globe asked to have Peter Quinn's travel expenses investigated. Though Mr. Quinn was exonerated, it is an indication that he was under some sort of character attack. There's some dirty dealing going on. No clear evidentiary trail has been found that implicates Microsoft in this affair. However, there is only one single entity in the whole world that both benefits from the status quo (keeping documents in a proprietary format) and loses market power due to the Commonwealth's refusal to keep its documents in a proprietary format.
Again, there is no apparent legal evidentiary trail linking Microsoft to the tarring of Peter Quinn in the Boston Globe. There is no apparent legal evidentiary trail linking Microsoft to recent efforts by the Massachusetts legislature to take control of decisions, such as the recent open format decision by the I.T. department. But someone is acting in a way to reverse the Massachusetts open document format decision.
I am speculating here. It stinks, though, and it is the same sort of stink that I've smelled from Microsoft throughout the last 15 years. Interestingly, Microsoft has written a covenant not to sue anyone who wants to implement software that reads and writes their proprietary Office format. That format is not ready for use, and Microsoft has a sterling reputation for failing to document any of their formats properly. So an implementer of a competing product using Microsoft's "open XML" format will never be able to track Microsoft's strategically designed documentation "errata" without their help. The result is the same as it has always been with Microsoft. To quote a phrase back when Microsoft was slaughtering Lotus 1-2-3: "It ain't done until Lotus won't run" (this phrase is somewhat apocryphal, but it's instructive to note that competitors in the Windows application marketplace were never able to achieve anywhere near the same quality of results as Microsoft.)
The way I see it, this is a perfect example of the corporate need for every single action that people take, every path that they need to follow, to be owned by some profit-making corporate entity who can charge a toll for use of "their property". As usual, it's about "ownership" and not work, competiveness, efficiency, effectiveness, or even creative marketing. It is simply about making sure the "owners" can charge a tax (or, to quote the estimable Stirling Newberry, "rents") for every single transaction that occurs in our society. In the open document format debate, it is Microsoft who wants to make sure everyone who uses or stores documents will have an incentive to use their software for the job.
References:
CRN story
Groklaw is an invaluable resource for pwople wishing to understand some of the legal wrangling going on in the computer technology world.