Page II: A growing roster of de facto standards is testing the need for bureaucratic agencies and design-by-committee technologies.
Closed file formats that may not work with other applications have been a significant part of Microsoft's domination of the productivity software market, said Gordon Haff, an analyst for research firm Illuminata.
"The concerns about compatibility ... certainly are a major reason that keep people on Microsoft Office," he said.
Microsoft took major steps toward addressing compatibility concerns with the arrival of Office 2003, which includes options to save documents based on XML, an open standard widely recognised by competing applications. Microsoft took the next step by publishing the proprietary XML dialects, or "schemas," used by the main Office applications under a royalty-free plan intended to boost support among outside software publishers.
Publishing the schemas was an effective way to address growing concerns among governments and other customers about interoperability and archival issues surrounding documents, said David Kaefer, director of Microsoft's intellectual property and licensing group.
The European Union praised the schema publication in a recent report and suggested Microsoft take a few more steps toward ensuring interoperability and document integrity, including submitting the Office XML schemas to a recognized standards body.
Influential open-source developer Bruce Perens agreed that supervision by a standards body would be a significant step toward achieving true standards.
"The key thing about open standards is that they're fair, impartial and available for everybody to implement," he said. "The Microsoft offerings fall short of that in a number of ways. It would be nice if we could have a level playing field."
Kaefer argued that submission to a standards body wouldn't offer any practical advantage over Microsoft's commitment to publish the schemas royalty-free, and it could substantially impede innovation surrounding the formats.
"We don't see a lot of upside to a standardisation process here," he said. "For technologies that are pretty mature, you're always worried about, 'Are we going to be limited in how we can innovate?'"
RedMonk's O'Grady said the partial step of publishing the XML schemas could be enough to protect Microsoft from regulatory pressure to further open the formats, particularly the more familiar .doc and .xls extensions, as Microsoft faces ongoing scrutiny from the European Union.
The Adobe way
On the other end of the "de facto" spectrum is Adobe's PDF (portable document format), widely used for electronic distribution of documents. Adobe still owns the specification, which originated in the early 1990s and was considered for submission to a standards body. But it's so freely published that hundreds of non-Adobe tools for generating PDF documents are on the market, including components built into Apple Computer's Macintosh operating system and the Openoffice.org productivity package.
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