That Dog Don’t Hunt

May 17, 2007

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it had voted in support of adding the Open Document Format (ODF) 1.0 to the American National Standards List, thereby making ODF a non-exclusive national standard of the United States. This is a typical move by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to make national standards from ISO-adopted specifications.

Microsoft’s actions, coming as they do amidst ISO’s consideration of a Microsoft supported technology, Ecma Office Open XML, is especially telling about the company’s approach to document formats and customer data.

Why does this matter?

Ecma’s Open XML specification has been under a relentless barrage of nonsense, twaddle and claptrap. It has been accused of being Microsoft’s insidious Trojan horse into networks worldwide to lock-in users to Microsoft’s Office suite. Governments have been told alarming tales of how Ecma’s open, and freely downloadable, specification is really Microsoft’s attempt to lock all of the world’s data up and make it non-accessible to its owners. At, an admittedly hefty, 6,000 pages it is being construed as only implementable by Microsoft. Some of the more extreme ODF partisans have been to governments around the globe painting fearsome pictures of market manipulation by Microsoft.

The fact is that if competitors to Microsoft spent as much time, energy and money innovating on products that customers actually wanted to buy, they wouldn’t have to spend those resources wastefully on a campaign to lock a competing technology out of the market. I hear these arguments about how Microsoft is trying to corner the market, but the fact is that it is our competitors’ who are destroying years of détente in the technology industry by running around advocating government procurement preferences. They tell governments that to protect their citizens they must legislate a preference for their own technology. I don’t know about you, but every time someone starts telling my government that it has to legislate a preference for their technology, I get nervous.

The picture painted is of big, bad Microsoft beating the rest of the world, and the market, into submission. We are painted as an agent of evil for telling the truth about what the Open XML document format means, not just for our customers but customers of Novell, DataViz and soon to be Corel and Sun as well. We are excoriated for explaining our vision of the universe of data already existing and still to be created. By simply participating in the process and telling our side of the story, we are accused of manipulating the process for our own gains.

There’s a saying in the Southern U.S., “That dog don’t hunt.” It means that the statements being made don’t hold up to any responsible scrutiny. Microsoft made a very clear statement about its intentions and its commitment to interoperability and choice in the marketplace when it voted “Yes” for both ISO and ANSI adoption of ODF. Now, let’s see the supporters of ODF tone down the histrionics and have a rational discussion about the merits of Ecma’s Open XML in the marketplace. Only those who lack facts rely solely on emotion. I have a lot of faith in the power of the market (which is saying a lot considering I’m a tried and true Democrat), and I also have an overriding belief in the ability of people to choose what solution will meet their unique needs at that point in time. Let’s stop the one-sided name calling and compete. I’m ready, are you?

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