A computer battle that could change the world as you know it

A battle royal is going on behind the scenes as the International Standards Organisation (ISO) deliberates over whether two standards for office software should continue to be approved, or only one. The British Standards Institute (BSI) will be voting on this alongside the other standards bodies this summer.  

The implications of the decision will reverberate far and wide across the globe.  It will affect the kind of software we will all use in the next decades, the shape of the office products software industry, the UK’s place in it, the pockets of government and its citizens, and the quality and extent of retrieval of archived documentation.

Perhaps not surprisingly, it is Microsoft pitted against an alliance of smaller and larger software firms together with the ‘open source community’ — a host of innovators, activists and ‘techies’ wanting to be free of Microsoft’s grasp and dreaming of a future that is as creative and innovative for PC software as the web has been.

It has not become a political issue in the UK yet, though it has elsewhere: three US States have recently made procuring open standard format operating systems, where possible, mandatory in the public sector.  Some public sector organisations in the UK are starting to baulk at the costs of proprietary systems, and more are sure to follow.  

The central issue is whether software vendors should be allowed to own the format in which data is stored, retrieved, displayed and manipulated.  Doing so locks out competition, stifles innovation and reduces retrieval quality and even the possibility of retrieving archived documents — it is a bad deal for everyone, except the proprietors of the format.

The key issue is interoperability: the ability to communicate electronically between two parties without both of them having to be signed up to the same proprietary system. If you are using a proprietary system then you are almost certainly dictating that the other party sign up to it too.   

With 90 per cent of the PC office applications market dominated by Microsoft, does this matter? In short, yes it does. It removes choice in the market place as users are forced to either buy into Microsoft or to upgrade their existing Microsoft software in order to communicate with government, business and others in a market dominated by one proprietary system. Existing users are unable to move to other systems because of the need to view old data.  It means higher costs for users and lower functionality.

The ability to access archived data is another problem with proprietary systems. Since the 1980s, almost all data has been stored not on paper but electronically in binary code: 0s and 1s.

While there are issues concerning hardware durability, the real question is the viability of the format that the data is written in.

Many formats are no longer supported by companies, or the only application under which it operated may no longer exist. ‘Translation’ software is available, but while it retrieves the ‘words’ well enough the format and the punctuation often are lost.

It is unlikely to be good enough for historians — or the courts. The problem gets worse by the day, as the number of users multiply and their electronic data use soars; the legacy problem is snowballing.

What is the alternative? An open standard would allow all data to be read and edited freely without control by one company. Any user could write applications without restriction, creating a market place with a maximum level of choice for consumers. All spreadsheets, text files and presentations would be readable across applications.

This possibility was recognised many years ago: in 2002 a group under the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), one of the world’s leading standards bodies, started working on an open document format standard (ODF); it was ratified by the ISO in 2006.  

Microsoft ignored this development, despite being members of OASIS, and developed their own standard — Office Open XML, now ratified by another ‘standards board’, the European Computer Manufacturers Association (Ecma).  There are now two competing approaches:  one open standard and one vendor-dominated standard.

One open standard would maximise the benefits of the market place, encourage innovation, competition and choice. Dual competing standards would have the opposite effect. Either Microsoft must fully adopt open document formats or the standards bodies need to insist on a single standard.

Without a single standard — Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) — we would not have seen the exponential growth in the mobile market. Nor would the world wide web have taken off had HTML not been an open standard.  (See quote below.)

A single open standard would open up the market place for consumers, software writers and companies across the world, benefiting UK consumers and our software industry.

Perhaps most of all, and hardest to express, is the transformation of the product base that we presently understand by the term ‘office software’ that open standards will bring. We will all be like the Polish man who woke recently from a coma to find Communism gone and the shops full of goods he could not have imagined. It is time the wall came down.

 Alexander Howard is an Associate Editor of Parliamentary Brief.

 Take away the open standard, take away the web...

‘It was the standardisation around HTML that allowed the web to take off. It was not only the fact that it is standard, but the fact that it is open and royalty-free. If HTML had not been free, if it had been proprietary technology, then there would have been the business of actually selling HTML and the competing JTML, LTML, MTML products. Because we would not have had the open platform, we would have had competition for these various different browser platforms but we would not have had the web. We would not have had everything growing on top of it. So I think it very important that as we move on to new spaces [...] we must keep the same openness we had before. We must keep an open internet platform, keep the standards for the presentation languages common and royalty-free. So that means, yes, we need standards, because the money, the excitement is not competing over the technology at that level. The excitement is in the businesses and the applications that you built on top of the web platform.’

—Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web