Internet-Standard.com

You can’t underestimate the importance of having open standards: imagine the chaos if, 100 years ago, telephone companies dug in their heels over maintaining their own protocols for telecommunications signals, electric companies mandated that their customers could only use electricity delivered through proprietary plugs and outlets, and radio/television broadcasters required listeners/viewers to use proprietary receivers.

You would have needed three different television sets to watch shows on the three big networks; changing electric companies would require purchasing brand new appliances; you would only be able to use your phone to communicate with other customers of your phone company.

Sort of like in the old days, when corporate computer users routinely had a PC sitting next to a DEC VT terminal, next to an IBM 3270 terminal.

Now we have the Internet, and the open TCP/IP Internet protocols, and life is good. But Microsoft just won’t let the world have a set of open standards for digital documents. They want us to use Microsoft’s Open Office Extensible Mark Up Language (OOXML). Despite what Microsoft is saying about it (Strong Global Support for Open XML as It Enters Final Phase of ISO Standards Process), there is a lot of resistance to Microsoft’s "alternative" to the more fully and truly open standard, ODF. And in fact, the ISO standards body has also rejected the "standard".

Here are some of the headlines (hard news/opiniated bloggers mix):

• NZ rejects Microsoft OOXML, Sweden confused
• India throws MS open format out of the window 
• Microsoft FUD Watch: OOXML Edition
• ISO Says No To Microsoft’s OOXML Standard
• The Latest News on the Microsoft OOXML Fiasco (Updated)
• Can Other Vendors Implement Microsoft’s Office Open XML? This is the key question for an open standard, and the answer, apparently, is NOT!
• and so on, for many many results (check it out yourself: Google Microsoft+OOXML for the latest news).

The most telling, and most important bit of information here is that, basically, the Microsoft "standard" is, if not impossible, at least difficult for anyone but Microsoft to implement. The whole point of having open standards is to enable interoperability. It’s good for everyone, because the result is a much bigger "network" of interoperable nodes (c.f., Internet). But it’s not good for companies that have huge investments in proprietary networks (c.f., Microsoft) because it lowers the entry barriers to the smaller companies that are more likely to innovate with better solutions that work for everyone.

If you have any questions about whether open standards are better than proprietary standards, just check the past 25 years of computer networking: if you stuck with proprietary networking protocols, you were toast. Novell is no longer in the networking business because they ignored TCP/IP for too long; Microsoft is still in the networking business because, eventually, they acknowledged that they needed to support TCP/IP in addition to their own proprietary protocols.

So I’m always happy to see others writing about the advantages and benefits of open standards. For example, Robert Strohmeyer’s recent article, Open Up to Open Formats at Maximum PC.

The reason we still see businesses selling proprietary standards/protocols is that they are still seen as achieving a benefit–for the vendor. If you buy into Software Vendor X’s proprietary file formats (for word processing, accounting, audio or video), you’re locked in to that vendor. If that vendor goes belly up, or decides to stop selling your favorite software, or just decides to switch to a new proprietary standard, you’re stuck. You’ve got to find a way to migrate your data, yet again, to the standard du jour.