« Process matters | Main | Two-dimensional culture »

Distrust and verify

November 22, 2005

Microsoft is giving itself a hearty pat on the back for announcing its intention to open up its Office formats. It will, says product manager Brian Jones, "fully document all of our schemas so that anyone can understand how to develop on top of them." It will also change the formats' licensing terms, providing "a very simple and general statement that we make an irrevocable commitment not to sue" anyone using the formats. Crows Jones: "This is obviously a huge step forward and it really helps to increase the value of these document formats because of the improved transparency and interoperability." Adds Alan Yates, another Microsoft executive: "We look forward to the day when people look at this as a milestone, as the beginning of the end for closed documents."

Whether it's a huge step forward remains to be seen - there are a few weasel words in the official announcements - though it does look like a clear step forward. But excuse me if I hold my applause. Microsoft has been an obstructionist on open documents for years, and the reason it's finally changing its ways is because governments have been holding a gun to its head, abandoning or threatening to abandon Office in favor of the open-source alternative OpenOffice. (Microsoft still refuses to make OpenOffice's Open Document format compatible with Office.) For Yates to say that Microsoft's announcement is "the beginning of the end for closed documents" is ludicrous. The beginning happened a long time ago, and Microsoft had nothing to do with it. It would be nice if the company acknowledged that.

So, sure, let's welcome this move. But my advice to the governments and other organizations that have spurred it is this: Keep up the pressure.

Advertisement: Are you ready for "The Big Switch"? Fast Company calls Nicholas Carr's new book "compulsively readable - for nontechies, too." Salon says it's "magisterial." Order now from Amazon.com.

Comments

Precisely.

Posted by: Sam Hiser at November 27, 2005 10:11 PM

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?


 Subscribe to Rough Type

The Atlantic article:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

Nick's new book: bigswitchcover2thumb.jpg "Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company

"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews

"Riveting stuff" -New York Post

Order from Amazon

Visit Big Switch site

Read Q&A with Nick

Greatest hits

The amorality of Web 2.0

The editor and the crowd

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

The great unread

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar

Sharecropping the long tail

The social graft

Steve Jobs' devices

MySpace's vacancy

Other writing

The ignorance of crowds

The recorded life

The end of corporate computing

IT doesn't matter

The parasitic blogger

The sixth force

Hypermediation

More

Nick's last book: Order from Amazon

Visit book site

Rough Type is:

Written and published by
Nicholas Carr

Designed by

JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

What?