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.

Last week, Ross Mayfield posted an interesting essay called The End of Process. In it, he argues that software-mediated social networks will tend to render formal business processes obsolete by reducing the costs of communication and coordination. “I do believe,” he says, “the arguments for engineering organizations are being trumped by new practices and simple tools. The first organizations bringing [processes] to an end will have a decided competitive advantage.” He goes on to claim that even today “some staid corporations are abandoning process all together.”

While provocative, the argument is much too broad, and it floats on a raft of dubious assumptions. “Organizations,” Mayfield writes, “are trapped in a spiral of declining innovation led by the false promise of efficiency. Workers are given firm guidelines and are trained to only draw within them. Managers have the false belief engineered process and hoarding information is a substitute for good leadership.” Actually, over the past 50 years or so, businesses have become steadily more flexible, more innovative, less bureaucratic, less hierarchical, and less characterized by rigid work flows and fragmented and hoarded information. They aren’t free from these problems, of course, but in general they’ve been getting better rather than worse. There’s no “spiral of declining innovation led by the false promise of efficiency.”

In fact, meticulously defined and managed processes continue to be a powerful source of competitive advantage for many companies. Look at Toyota, for instance. Its highly engineered manufacturing processes not only give it superior productivity but also provide a platform for constant learning and improvement. The formal structure, which is anything but democratic, spurs both efficiency and innovation – productive innovation – simultaneously. Structured, well-thought-out processes are also essential to most knowledge work, from product development to financial analysis to software engineering to sales and marketing. And the more complex the effort, the greater the need for clear processes. Far from making business less effective and agile, the increasing attention to process has increased effectiveness and agility.

In a response to Mayfield’s post, IBM’s Irving Wladawsky-Berger says that “an innovative business looks for the proper balance between process – covering those aspects of the business that can be designed, standardized, and increasingly automated – and people – who bring their creativity and adaptability to handle everything else.” I see what he’s getting at, but I don’t agree that there’s necessarily a tension between process and people. Bad processes can destroy individual initiative, but well-designed processes, even very formal ones, can encourage individual initiative and, importantly, guide personal and group creativity toward commercially productive ends. I’m not sure you need to balance process and people so much as harmonize them.

If Mayfield had narrowed his argument, focusing on the way knowledge workers collaborate in certain situations, rather than on business processes in general, he would have been much more compelling. The simple group-forming and information-sharing software tools now being introduced and refined will often provide greater flexibility and effectiveness than more complex “knowledge management” systems. But even in these cases, processes aren’t going away; they’re just changing. There can’t be organization without process.

Two of the best writers on information technology, Robert X. Cringely and Joel Spolsky, have just delivered thought-provoking new articles. Cringely speculates on how Google plans to deploy scores of portable data centers throughout the land, which combined with its reputed ownership of large amounts of installed fiber-optic cable will enable it to turn “the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid” under its control. “There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We’ll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper … And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google.”

Spolsky offers an alternative, and persuasive, take on why record companies are trying to get Apple to charge different prices for songs at its iTunes Music Store. “What they really want,” he argues, “is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they’re new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they’ll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are.” We usually assume that you increase sales by reducing prices, but as Spolsky shows it’s not so simple. Consumers are anything but rational.

Huh? Problem? What problem?

Ah, precisely.

A week or so ago, the U.S. Senate held some hearings on pornography, including the internet’s vast and various store of the stuff. Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, called porn a “problem of harm, not an issue of taste.” Nobody, though, paid much attention to the proceedings. Popular blogger Jeff Jarvis, in a post titled A Nation of Hairy Palms, dismissed it all as “silly crap” from “conservative prudes.”

Jarvis’s reaction is typical of the blogosphere’s, and, for that matter, the whole country’s, laissez faire attitude toward online porn: Yeah, there’s a whole lot of it out there, but it’s basically harmless, even kind of amusing. Anyone who has the temerity to criticize it, or even call attention to it, is just a prude or a loser who deserves to be ridiculed and ignored.

Another common view of digital porn is that it’s useful – as a case study for internet businesses. Paul Kedrosky, in a recent post, rehearses this theme: “I think that a valuable startup exercise would be to do a wholesale survey of all emerging technology in the promotion, selling, and distribution of online porn …” I’ve probably said or written similar things in the past, as have many others.

But maybe the most common reaction of all is simply denial. When Icann recently proposed setting up an online red-light district, under the .xxx domain, many politicians around the world, led by President Bush, attacked the idea, and Icann shelved the plan. Establishing a porn domain would have acknowledged the fact that the web is crammed with naughty pictures and videos. Without .xxx, we can pretend it doesn’t exist – or at least distance ourselves from it.

I don’t think I’m a prude (and I like to pretend I’m not a loser), but I’d like to suggest that internet pornography is bad. Very bad, in fact. I’m not talking here about your run-of-the-mill dirty pictures and movies – the stuff you’d find in Playboy or Penthouse or your local video store. I’m talking about the really gruesome stuff. If you have a blog, you’re familiar with trackback spam – links that spammers add to your site in order to promote their own sites. My daily chore of deleting trackback spam has, unfortunately, opened for me a window onto the internet pornography industry. Here, for your edification, is a small selection of the headlines I routinely have to delete from my site:

Sex with animals

Rape fantasies

Father-son incest

Gagging

Brutal [fill in the blank]

These are not the worst of them. The long tail of online pornography is a very long tail indeed, meticulously documenting the full scope and intricacy of human depravity, from the simulated rape and torture of women through bestiality and on to child pornography and other criminal diversions. And guess what? Photographs and video clips of all of it are readily available, not only to adults but to children as well. There are no drawn curtains, no blacked-out windows, on the internet. Think you need a credit card to get this stuff? Think again. Think that filters are reliable, or that kids can’t get around them? Dream on. (And even if you carefully monitor what your kids do on your family’s computers, do you really think all your kids’ friends’ parents are as diligent? Yeah, right.)

[A few hours after posting this entry, I decided to delete a paragraph that originally appeared here. The paragraph provided an example showing how easy it is for anyone to access the type of stuff I’ve been describing (and also illustrated how search engines, by cataloguing the material, facilitate its discovery). I came to fear that the example might have the counterproductive effect of promoting what I’m trying to criticize.]

This isn’t a call to arms. I don’t have the backbone to be a crusader. I just find it curious how easily we’ve come to accept what just a few years ago would have been unimaginable – both the content and its accessibility. Then again, maybe it’s not so curious. In his 1993 article Defining Deviancy Down, published in the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out that:

there are circumstances in which society will choose not to notice behavior that would be otherwise controlled, or disapproved, or even punished. It appears to me that this is in fact what we in the United States have been doing of late. I proffer the thesis that, over the past generation … the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognize” and that, accordingly, we have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard.

Moynihan was writing specifically about criminal behavior, but the analysis holds for pornography as well. As a society, we can’t afford to recognize what we all know exists – what in fact lies just a click or two away from whatever we, or our children, happen to be looking at on the web at any given moment. And we can’t afford to consider that when Orrin Hatch calls it “a problem of harm, not an issue of taste,” he may be right. It’s so much simpler to pretend that what he’s saying is “silly crap.”

Continuing its masterly replay of Microsoft’s old kill-competitors-by-bundling-their-products-as-free-features-in-our-platform strategy, Google today begins giving away tools for analyzing the effectiveness of web advertising. The Google Analytics service is a repackaging of the Urchin software that Google acquired earlier this year. In addition to the competitive benefits – Google Analytics is a hammer blow to small specialist companies like Web Side Story, and it neutralizes analytics as a potential advantage for direct competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft – the free service will likely increase sales for Google’s AdWords service. Analytical tools for ad performance are a complement to advertising itself. By giving the complement away, you’ll tend to boost demand for the ads. (Joel Spolsky explains the economics of complements well.)

Of course, the service also means that Google will gain access to a ton of new data on ad performance that it can analyze itself. For one thing, Google Analytics can be applied to ad campaigns running outside the Google network, giving Google information on how its competitors’ programs perform. For another, Google will gain greater insight into the decision making of its AdWords customers, information that could help it in optimizing its ad pricing (ie, maximizing its income at customers’ expense). No need to worry, though. Google says we can all trust it to do the right thing. A Google executive told CNET: “We have very strict controls on the data. It is only used to provide reporting to customers and people using the analytics.”

It’s hard to complain about getting stuff for free that you used to have to pay for. This is, after all, how competition is supposed to work – the benefits fall to the customer. And that’s great. Beyond the question about what happens to the data Google collects, though, there’s another concern, which may or may not be purely theoretical. When Microsoft fought competitors by bundling new features into its operating system, it was frequently attacked for chilling innovation. When you give a product or service away, you take away the economic incentive for inventors and entrepreneurs to improve the product. Google right now is such a rabid innovator that it’s hard to think of the company as being a force that impedes innovation. But even a cute 800-pound gorilla is still an 800-pound gorilla.