The devil’s in the details
By Charles Miller

Last week in this column, I praised Microsoft for the changes made to new Internet Explorer version 8 which brought it into compliance with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Microsoft’s cooperation will certainly help to make the Web a more compatible place for all users. I would never want that kind of praise to go to Microsoft’s heads, so this week it is time to bash them a bit.

Recent updates to the flagship product Microsoft Office 2007, which includes Word and Excel, were supposed to make these products compatible with Open Source office productivity software. It seemed too good to be true and apparently it was.

A problem that has been with us for decades is a lack of compatibility or interoperability between programs. Microsoft Word could not open a file created by WordPerfect, which could not exchange data with WordStar. On top of that, last year’s version of Word could not read a file created by this year’s version of Word. In 20 years little progress has been made toward fixing this.

The file format “Open Document Format” (ODF) was originally created for Sun Microsystems and its OpenOffice product. ODF was standardized by the prestigious International Standards Organization (ISO). With the implementation of ODF, computer users will finally have a file format for documents and spreadsheets that is interchangeable between different brands of office productivity software and different versions of the same software. For Microsoft to promise they will implement this in Office 2007 is a very big deal.

The most recent updates were supposed to have brought ODF interoperability to Microsoft Office 2007, and Microsoft claims it now has a fully compliant version of ODF. At this point, the air should be cleaner and the grass greener, but the devil, as always, is in the details.

The problem is that Microsoft’s implementation of ODF is completely useless at interoperating with any other software other than Microsoft software. What Microsoft has done is not a move toward compatibility and interoperability; it’s an unprincipled attack on the very concept of cooperation.

A lot of us technical people are scratching our heads and wondering how this happened. Microsoft says it implemented the standard fully, and indeed it did. So long as other software companies implement the same standard then everything should work together and all the files should be interchangeable. That is the way it should work; so why does it not work that way?

The reason is that standards themselves are often not exactly perfect or well-enough defined. In this case the ODF standard is missing a strict-enough definition of spreadsheet formulas.

By punctilious observation of every rule in the ODF standard, while completely ignoring the spirit of it, Microsoft found a way to throw a monkey wrench into the industry move toward compatibility. Microsoft exploited this by saving its formulas in a place where no other programs are currently designed to look for them. The result is Excel spreadsheet files are still incompatible with other software programs.

It is clear that Microsoft benefits from this type of confusion in the marketplace. A generation of PC users has now learned they do not have to confront the technical aspects of incompatible file formats so long as they use only the newest versions of Microsoft products, and nothing else.

Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant, a frequent visitor to San Miguel since 1981 and now practically a full-time resident. He may be contacted at 044 (415-) 101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.