Devil's Advocate: Microsoft's new allies

The EU should stand firm on advocating independent, open standards for software - despite the new offence Microsoft appears to be raising across the pond, says Martin Brampton.

Microsoft is apparently organising a campaign against European regulators. It wants other US companies who may suffer from regulation to back its fight against EU penalties. And all this comes just at the time when a fresh battle over Office file formats is brewing.

One of Microsoft's targets for its message has been pharmaceutical companies. Maybe they have quite a bit of muscle when it comes to persuading the US government to take action but the rest of us might want to be rather cautious, seeing Microsoft keeping such company.

After all, while pharmaceutical companies deliver products of value, they are not an unmitigated good. As companies, their primary motivation is making money and that does not neatly coincide with people's desire to be healthy. To make money, pharmaceutical companies want people to be in need of treatment, preferably in the form of long term medication. Short, cheap treatments that achieve a cure are not profitable.

Microsoft's desire to ally itself with the drug companies might well be seen as a move to yet further encourage our dependence on a never ending supply of software fixes and upgrades.

So, Microsoft's desire to ally itself with the drug companies might well be seen as a move to yet further encourage our dependence on a never ending supply of software fixes and upgrades. One could ask whether this is really the best route to software health.

We should also be encouraging the EU in its struggle to force non-proprietary standards for the exchange of information. It is extraordinary how easily many people give up control of their own data. This has been happening for many years and in many sectors but has become particularly obvious with the Microsoft Office suite.

The coming version will use XML, and there have been attempts to persuade the ignorant that this is, in itself, a standardisation of the file formats. But the mere use of XML involves standards at such a basic level as to be little more use than other basic standards, such as the ASCII character set. Clearly of some value, such standards are not enough to make file formats open.

Software makers have long been aware that the price of software is usually low in comparison with the value of the information to be accumulated by the software. A reasonable question has always been how the data could be extracted from the software for use in some other context. Perhaps including use in a rival software product.

While this is a question that people most certainly should have been asking, they have only rarely done so. Yet why place something that you own, and is of considerable value, into a container that will not freely return your property to you? This is to give control of your assets to someone else without any compensatory gain in return. Naturally, software companies have found ways to capitalise on the situation.

Despite this, there have been some trends that have worked in the opposite direction. Relational database systems have been so widely understood that it is comparatively easy to extract data from them. It is a good deal easier if only ANSI SQL has been used but few organisations actually constrain themselves in that way. All the same, the possibility of broad standards has been clearly demonstrated.

It therefore seems entirely reasonable the EU should demand information be exchanged in formats that are determined by standards bodies independently of vendors and their proprietary schemes. It is in all our interests that the EU should persevere, even if it is faced by a range of large US corporations and the possible wrath of the US government.