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Feature:Alternative View of Microsoft Monopoly
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Alternative View of the Microsoft Monopoly
As the Microsoft anti-trust trial is set to resume, it is likely that Microsoft will face some form of legal action. The key is that the government has to prove that consumers have been harmed in some way. This is not so clear, and it's even been argued that Microsoft's dominance has even benefited end users by providing a stable marketplace for products to develop without software publishers having to commit needless resources to porting products to multiple platforms. However, these arguments have all focused on the direct economic benefits and losses that consumers have received from this situation. It is not economic losses that the public has suffered, but loss of choice.Microsoft's domination has limited the axes of competition to one variable, the ability to work with others on the creation of documents. It has not achieved this from a monopoly in operating systems but a monopoly in application file formats. With this understanding, it makes the charges of Microsoft abusing it's monopoly position in the browser market irrelevant. So it's clear what legal action should be taken by the government to create an open market in software. I come to these conclusion from my own personal experiences and that's a good place to start.
As I sit here composing this essay, I am surrounded by three computers and let me explain why. People purchase computers to perform certain using software applications, and I am no different, except that I may be a little more techno savvy than others. I have an Apple Macintosh Powerbook that I prefer to use for doing my writing work because it allows me to concentrate on my writing and not the computer. A fairly common claim about the Macintosh, and I am going to leave that at face value because it is my experience, and for me that's all that matters. I also have a machine that is running the increasingly popular open-source operating system Linux. I use this operating system because it the most stable and affordable operating system that meets my needs as a web publisher and programmer. Lastly, this brings me to my machine running Windows95. I often receive files from others that I have to read, comment and edit. And more times than not, they are Microsoft Office documents. The best way and until recently the only way to read Office97 documents is using Microsoft Office on Windows. Given my choice and convenience, I use other easier, more stable alternatives for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations when I know that I am the only one who will be reading them. Unfortunately, most of the time that is not the case. So I possess what I consider this extra machine, because I have to do something as basic commenting on a memo. This is the sole reason I continue to have in my possession a Windows machine. Finally, the other major task that I do is web surfing, and surprisingly, I find all three platforms acceptable for that task. So I in effect have no choice but to run Office97, and hence Windows95 and to understand why this is, one has to understand the transformation that occurred in the last 10 years in how we create, manipulate and exchange information. Since the creation of movable type and the printing press nearly five centuries ago, we have not fundamentally changed the way that we work with information. Gutenberg triggered a revolution by enabling the mass production and distribution of information. A more recent minor leap occurred with photocopying which enabled mass publication without the necessity of typesetting. Both these technological leaps involved improving the way we work with the underlying medium of information, which is paper, not words. Paper enabled distribution of ideas and its hegemony in every stage of information creation has been unchallenged until now.
The major application of computers is word processing. Word processing is not about efficiency, but about enabling non-specialists the ability to create finished documents. Word processing is more correctly called document processing.
Historically when someone created information in the form of a memo, a play or an accounting log, she would use pen and paper and create in long hand. This paper would then be handed to a secretary who would transform this into a distributable form by typing it out. A secretary was used because she could reliably and quickly do this. Secretaries were in effect specialists in using a typewriter. Not much different from a concert pianist in the precision and flawlessness required. Word processing changed that, because the person running the keyboard no longer had to execute flawlessly. The computer tolerated the introduction of errors by delaying the final output. Word processors made it safe for idea creators to create not only ideas, but documents as well. All without the assistance of secretaries and delivered the final kiss of death to the typing pool. This ability to manipulate the final product is what human interface specialists call direct manipulation. The actual process may not have become more efficient -- I am a slower typist than most, but it enabled it to be more direct. But the target has always the same, a well formatted document on paper.
To further emphasize how important paper was in our conception of documents, the importance of the Graphical User Interface or GUI was not ease of use, but in the fact that the computer screen was true to its eventual appearance on paper. WYSIWYG -- "What You See is What You Get" should have really been called WYSIWYGOP, "What You See is What You Get On Paper." It was this fidelity in desktop publishing that gave the Macintosh its foothold into the prepress business.
Word processors may have initially simplified the creation of documents, but it did not immediately change the method of distribution and the revision of documents. These processes still took place on paper. A typical scenario was you would use the computer to create a manual, print out a draft and make photocopies for distribution. Others would then make comments and edits on these copies and return them to you. At which point you would make these changes on the computer. An especially comedic situation was that someone would type a letter using a word processor, printed it out, send it using a fax machine and once it was received on the other end, retype it into another computer. This situation did not change until the advent of cheap removable media and computer data networks.
The edit and revision process slowly transformed when people started passing floppy disks around, and later through the use of e-mail. In both cases, the actual data file was being exchanged and now editors and reviewers also engaged in direct manipulation. Data networks accelerated this sharing of information and finally intruded into publishing. No longer was it necessary for one to actually print out a document if one didn't want to. Once display technologies improve to match the resolution of paper, paper's hegemony will end except for long term archival purposes.
Paper has been replaced by the computer data file, but more specifically the Microsoft Office document. Word for word processing, Excel for spreadsheets and Powerpoint for presentations. This is the paper of our new age. When computers were used as instruments of creation and publishing, it was less important what program was used as long as the final product was on paper. But today the digital file serves this purpose. It would be ridiculous if you had to buy paper that required you to use a special pen to write on it, but that is exactly what happens today.
How Microsoft became the new paper standard is akin to the random events that lead to VHS becoming the standard for VCRs. One who has gets, gets and gets some more. Microsoft's initial aggressive marketing, bundling and discounting of its Office Suite led to a clear dominant position. This path dependency lead to dominance. Microsoft did in fact earn its riches through old fashion solid marketing, and has benefited from the spoils.
Today in the U.S., you cannot be an effective part of the information economy if you are unable to read a Microsoft Office document. It is for this reason, that when people buy computers for home, they buy what they have at the office. One has to have the ability to manipulate and read the documents they create and receive at work. Steve Jobs realized Apple would not have a chance if it a parity version of Office did not exist for the Macintosh. The importance of this commitment is under appreciated with respect to Apple's resurrection.
To understand how important file formats are, let's take a look at where another file format has emerged and not fallen to Microsoft and why -- the World Wide Web. Earlier I mentioned that I use all three of my computers almost equally well to surf the internet. The reason is that each of these machines has browsers which able to render and display web documents that are in a format known as the Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML. The conventional wisdom is that HTML is inter-operable because it is a public standard. This is only half of the truth. During the great browser war of the early 90s both Netscape and Microsoft tried to co-opt HTML by creating proprietary extensions. This resulted in a lot of web pages which would not display properly because they contained extensions which the competitor's browsers could not interpret correctly. The critical point is that the document was not displayed properly as opposed to not being displayed at all. In most cases, the relevant information is available to the reader. Compare this to the case where one receives a Word97 document by e-mail and does not have Word97; one is simply out of luck.
This information availability is a result of a quirk in the way the HTML language is specified and defined. In HTML, directives to the browsers in how to display a piece of text are sent in instructions contained in angle brackets. For example "" tells the browser to display all text following in bold until an off directive is encountered in the form of . These directives are known as "tags." What is brilliant is that if a browser encounters a tag that it does not understand, it is instructed to ignore that tag and continue to display the text as it has been. So when Netscape introduced a new tag that Microsoft's Internet Explorer did not understand, it did its best to display the remaining HTML. So the page was defective, not inoperable. This also means that HTML is by definition un-cooptable. Anyone can introduce a new tag into their web documents and this will not prevent others from reading the document, only the likelihood of them viewing it properly. HTML is unique in that it is mostly forward compatible as far as relevant data is concerned. The presence of standards is not sufficient to prevent bad behavior from companies, but a standard that cannot lock others out is necessary for a competitive marketplace. HTML can be broken but not crippled. A side point is that HTML was specified in ASCII which is a lowest common denominator encoding format open to all.
So it is clear that there can and will be real competition and choices in browsers, the same cannot be said for applications that can read Office documents. If I have another word processor I cannot generally view a document in the latest Word format. This even applies if I have an older version of Word. To work with the majority I am forced to upgrade or change. To see how critical the file format issue, let's look at some other markets where Microsoft does not dominate. Let's start with the aforementioned browser market which is very healthy relative to the office applications market. It supports two major players and many niche players successfully. Recently Microsoft became the market leader in the browser market, but it does not own the market in the same way it owns the office productivity market. It no more owns the browser market than the Republicans currently own Congress. If you look at the server market which makes up the infrastructure of the internet. For web servers, Linux and Apache are the market leaders, yet Microsoft and Netscape still have thriving businesses in this segment. This is the case because what is exchanged between computers is HTML. It doesn't matter who serves it up. The same applies to the back end database market, most data returned and stored in databases is ASCII and there is little interchange between them. Because of this Oracle, IBM and Microsoft and a school of smaller competitors are fighting it out in this market giving consumers a choice.
Lastly, let's look at the segment where Linux has risen to great popularity, the market niche of programmers and system administrators. These people tend to work independently and do not need to create documents in Microsoft Office and hence have no need to have a Windows machine. Now this is not to say that programmers and systems administrators do not use Windows, there are those who do. But most choose a system for other reasons such as stability, cost or scalability. Document compatibility is not an issue. At a major company I know, most of the programmers prefer using an operating system known as Unix, but they still have two machines at their desks. A Unix machine for doing their primary job, and a Windows machine to read and send documents to people outside of the programming community.
In every other segment, Microsoft does not dominate the market because in every other segment, the medium of interoperability is different. Web servers are a fragmented market, mail servers are a fragmented market, web browsers are a fragmented market and databases are a fragmented market. People have choices to perform these functions using alternatives which emphasizes the features that are important to them be it stability, ease of use, cost of ownership, supportability or whatever. However because the primary task of most computer users is document creation, people purchase Windows to work with others because they must run Office.
If this insight is correct, what can the government do to restore competitiveness to the software market? I believe there is a less draconian step than those being bandied around. The first step requires Microsoft to open up their document formats in sufficient detail such that others can create applications which can read Office documents flawlessly. Second, require Microsoft to publish all changes in these file formats six months in advance of any new release to allow competitors to update their products to read and write these new formats. The terms of this information can either be gratis or a reasonable licensing agreement. Third, Justice should oversee Microsoft's pricing practices, if there is one thing to be learned from what happened to internet browsers is that Microsoft is willing to engage in predatory pricing to drive out competitors. Even with open formats, very few organizations have as much cash on hand as Microsoft and are unlikely to last long in a price war. In an information economy, the medium of exchange is too important to be allowed to be controlled by one company, and until something web centralized is created, most information will be created and exchanged in Microsoft Office. The standard arguments to this proposal are the following. First, HTML is becoming the standard and that the marketplace will take over. This is faulty in that HTML is insufficient to accurately render paper documents, and the new XML standard is more concerned with data representation than with presentation. Others have pointed to Adobe's PDF or Portable Document Format to handle rendering, but it is a publishing format, not a creation format and definitely not an editing format.
Others counter that there exist conversion programs which allow you to use any program you choose. Unfortunately, these are usually reverse engineered solutions that are incomplete. Often the data is manipulated because the end product does not support a certain feature. Additionally the time delay to produce the converter after the introduction of a new format by Microsoft means that most people will not wait and deal with the inconvenience as their vendor upgrades their product. Lastly, there is the argument that Microsoft Office is available on the Macintosh, but the response is so laughably obvious in who provides that. History has also shown that Office for the Macintosh is usually not a parity version, that its release is behind that of the Windows version and generally available only at a higher cost than the Windows version. It also begs the question of conflict of interest for Microsoft to jeopardize its other businesses. A cynical view is that Microsoft's production of Office for Macintosh is more an effort to hold off anti-trust action than a sincere effort to grow a market.
Non-technological arguments include that the government has no right in defining the features and formats that are the basis for competition and innovation. In response, the government has historically imposed guidelines and standards when interchange is involved. This is no different from the government defining what gauge railroad tracks. And today, there is no other dominant form of interchange that is more unregulated than the Microsoft data formats.
This is a less drastic solution than forcing Microsoft to give up its source code or breaking Microsoft into applications and operating systems divisions. The latter does no good anyway, if the premise that interoperability of documents is the most important driver of computer choice. This will only result in two new monopolies at two new levels, especially if the applications division writes Office only for Windows.
So this proposal addresses market concerns, and shifts the market emphasis away from file formats which lock users, to other areas which are more beneficial to users. Computers are rightly disparaged for being too unreliable and too hard to use. Unfortunately, there are products which address these issues, but for most people are not acceptable because they need to be able to work with others at the document level. Hence the choice is either own multiple computers, or accept what Microsoft gives us. Most individuals and companies do not have the financial resources or time to do the former, so the majority accept the latter -- even if it means tolerating that stupid paper clip. The personal computer market has often been compared to the VCR war between VHS and Beta. But the focus of the analogy has been faulty, the correct format comparison is not between Macintosh and DOS/Windows, but in Office applications vs. everyone else. If I go to a consumer electronics store, I have a choice in VCRs which can all play VHS. Unfortunately, I do not have the same choice when "playing" Office documents. We live in an economy driven by the creation and exchange of information, and for any one company to own the format of the dominant format of interchange forces us to accept whatever that one company gives us. Doesn't seem like much choice to me.
This is really about Open Standards (Score:3)
Every computer company, whether hardware vendor or software vendor, plays the "customer lock-in" game. The object is to foster customer dependence on technology that only one company can deliver, and then take the customers to the proverbial cleaners because the customer has no alternatives.
Open standards for computer networking protocols, and for file formats, serve to mitigate or prevent customer lock-in, and this is why more open standards are a good thing, rather than a bad thing. Unfortunately, it appears that this seemingly obvious truth is lost on the majority of Information Systems (IS) professionals in the business world.
Open standards of this type are the central message of the Internet. The Internet Engineering Task Force [ietf.org] (IETF) requires demonstrated "interoperability", i.e. disparate computers and software successfully communicating, as the primary requirement for any standard specification to be advanced in their process.
A ScenarioImagine this scenario: you're the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a major corporation. You, in order to promote the efficient flow of information through the company, issue an edict to the effect that Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect, or whatever) shall be the standard software package for producing and exchanging documents throughout the company.
While this should work fine provided that there is a version of that software for every computer in your enterprise - an iffy proposition these days; there are two unhappy outcomes from this kind of "standard":
It is very difficult for a single software package to fully meet the needs and working styles of every person or group in a medium or large company, aside from the issue of finding a version of that single software for every computer your enterprise owns & operates.
Some people and departments will be very unhappy with your order, and will likely defy it, by using a different and probably incompatible software package that better fits their department's business needs. This will cause problems when they try to exchange documents.
You've just locked your company's document destiny to this one software vendor, and they can bleed you dry if they so choose. Or, worse, if they go out of business, you're stuck.
What's worse is that converting from one document format to another is usually difficult because of semantic information loss - different document representations have different assumptions, and it's usually not possible to cleanly translate from one set to another. This is the "lock-in." In strict terms, the software vendor can't charge you more than it could cost you to convert your documents to another format, but who has that particular price at his fingertips at any given moment?
A Different ScenarioNow, let's change the scenario a bit: instread of standardizing on a particular word processing software package, you order that all documents shall be in a standard file format, e.g. SGML with a particular DTD.
In this world, your company makes it clear to all software vendors that this is your chosen corporate document standard and that if they wish your business, their software must implement appropriate interpretation and manipulation of that file format.
This puts those software vendors into competition with each other for your business; presumably the one who can produce the best results with the most pleasant and efficient user interface will win your dollars.
This also gives the various different groups inside your company the freedom to pick the software that best suits their working style, so long as it produces the standard document file format. Everybody wins.
If we take this scenario further - you contact your fellow CIO's in other companies and promote this idea, then even more people and organizations win. Just by doing the right kind of standard.
How the Internet fitsThis is precisely what the Internet is about: standards for networking protocols, for E-mail & messaging, for file transfer, for remote access, and file formats like HTML. The Universities and Research Institutions that initially designed the Internet had exactly this result in mind: no one vendor in control, all competing on a level playing field for the business, with the best results for the customers.
Of course, the big companies will fight this kind of initiative because it requires them to compete harder - they can't rest on their laurels. Small companies will welcome this kind of initiative, because it gives them a foot-in-the-door with potentially big accounts, for (relative to their size) lots of money.
Some vendors will counter with "standards" of their own. Of these, some will be honest attempts to extend an existing public standard in a useful way, and some will be an attempt to stymie the process. The things to watch out for are:
no published specification (or an insufficiently published specification that cannot be independently implemented for lack of particular details).
onerous license or patent restrictions.
No alternative vendors of software for that "standard."
All of these end in customer lock-in to a proprietary "standard" - a situation which is not to the customer's benefit in the long run.
Open, public standards for file formats, and computer networking protocols are the right thing for everybody.
Another essay on this issue can be found at the Best Viewed With Any Browser [anybrowser.org] campaign site.
This article is at http://www.clock.org/~fair/opinion/open-standards. html [clock.org]
A response (Score:5)
It is not economic losses that the public has suffered, but loss of choice.
Later on in the article, Mr. Wu describes how, in addition to the two computers he uses to get his work done, he keeps a third machine with Windows and MS Office installed just because of Microsoft's monopolistic trade practices. I'd say this counts as an economic loss. Another economic loss is all the downtime and lost productivity due to Windows crashes.
Microsoft's domination has limited the axes of competition to one variable, the ability to work with others on the creation of documents. It has not achieved this from a monopoly in operating systems but a monopoly in application file formats.
I agree that their dominance in the field of file formats is troubling, but in my experience their OS monopoly can't be discounted either. It's both.
With this understanding, it makes the charges of Microsoft abusing it's monopoly position in the browser market irrelevant.
Nobody is accusing Microsoft of having a browser monopoly, much less abusing it. They are accused of using their OS Monopoly to get anti-competitive OEM bundling agreements, and using both of those to unfairly increase their browser's market share (among other things).
This is the sole reason I continue to have in my possession a Windows machine.
See! Economic loss.
The major application of computers is word processing.
No, the major application of computers is database processing. The major application of desktop computers is word processing.
To further emphasize how important paper was in our conception of documents, the importance of the Graphical User Interface or GUI was not ease of use, but in the fact that the computer screen
was true to its eventual appearance on paper. WYSIWYG -- "What You See is What You Get" should have really been called WYSIWYGOP, "What You See is What You Get On Paper." It was this fidelity in desktop publishing that gave the Macintosh its foothold into the prepress business.
There's a great quote, attributed to Brian Kernighan (of C fame), "The trouble with WYSIWYG is that what you see is all you get".
Paper has been replaced by the computer data file, but more specifically the Microsoft Office document.
Agreed, while some offices have rejected the Office document as a standard, too many have not. As long as a significant portion of the people you deal with use a document format, you've got to have a way of using it.
The first step [the government should impose] requires Microsoft to open up their document formats in sufficient detail such that others can create applications which can read Office documents flawlessly.
While I'd love to see such documentation, I disagree that the courts should require it. First off, I think the Justice department should be focusing on addressing Microsoft's direct restraint of trade and other anticompetitive business practices. It's hard to effectively do what you describe from the courts.
Secondly, it is easy for the government to achieve the same goal, without invoking the judiciary, and with a better (IMHO) result. The President should have his technology advisor draft an executive order specifying that by June, 2000, all electronic documents handled within government offices, and transmitted to and from government offices, must follow an attached standard. Then it should go ahead and specify the general standard (XML or whatever), and the specific formats for government word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, etc. The US Government is such a huge consumer of Microsoft products, MS would be foolish to not support such standards. All of us can then use such standards too, whether as a native file format, or merely a standard interchange format. Assuming the government makes their standard flexible and extensible (easy to do with things like XML) it should work well.
I think this is a better way to fix the document issue than to order Microsoft to do something that really can't be enforced.
I don't agree -- it's better to let MS Office die (Score:3)
open the MS Office file formats -- that
would only lead to even stronger support
of MS Office which we don't want -- we want
MS Office file format to die and go away not
become even more common.
Web documents should be the next standard,
not MS Office.
Think about all the proprietaray crap embedded
in each Word and Excel doc -- Windows-specific
fonts, OLE objects, backslased directory names,
ActiveX controls, VBA macros, etc, etc -- you
expect us to adopt all that stuff into other
platforms just so you won't be incovenienced??!!
We want Microsoft to keep doing what it's doing
-- go ahead and make MS Office as incompatible
as possible and slowly and surely people will
throw more support into cleaning up web
document standards and forget about using MS
Office formats.
Support web standards, not M$ standards.
Office documents and their use in the network age (Score:3)
Almost every day I get requests to put MSWord and MSExcel content "on the web." I fight this tooth and nail. We have an extranet web reporting system which collects data from all over the Enterprise. One of my jobs is to get this data into a somewhat coherent form in an Oracle database so our reporting CGIs can generate on-the-fly reports and graphs. I get data in a number of file formats. The best stuff comes from the mainframe folks (from SAS and MUMPS on VAX equipment). These folks understand extracts and data integrety. The worst stuff comes to me in Excel spreadsheets.
The first most obvious evil is file size. Positional or delimited extracts from the mainframe folks are clear, well organized, consistent and compact. On the Excel side I had one file, 750 records, 12 columns. File size? 1,387,000 bytes! Why? A similar file from the mainframe folks is about 110,000 bytes.
The next evil is data integrety. I have to explain over and over again to the Excel folks why they should use unique ids for each reporting unit, that they should use the same id for the same reportin unit across files. They tell me th names are on the spreadsheets, so why do I need that? I try to explain that there are spelling, capitalization, and punctuation differences between the names in each of the file depending on who types them. I try to explain that ID numbers are harder to mistype and that they are more efficient to search on.
They don't get it.
Microsoft has put computing power into the hands of people who don't know how to use it. I know that sounds techno-elitist of me, but it is TRUE! There is so much corruption of data going on out there because everyone has a PC on his or her desk. I wouldn't care if it were not for the fact that these people then come back to IS and say "make this all work together." That's where I get upset.
You see, I am all in favor of "power to the people" when it comes to information, but to me this is like studying taxidermy and thinking that makes you an open-heart surgeon.
Getting back to the web, that's the final evil. Try to explain to these people that some of our clients use Macs or that it might be unreasonable to assume that all of our customers have to buy Office and they just don't get it. Show them the difference in performance between downloading an HTML table and an Excel spreadsheet with the same content, and then tell them how much worse it would be on a 28.8 modem instead of a T1 and maybe they get it, but its a hard sell.
My Linux bigotry comes not from an inherent hatred of Windows per se. It comes from the fact that Linux embraces standards, and Windows makes it up as it goes along.
I'm afraid I'd have to side with the folks who say these formats should die. Even if enerything in the world interoperated with them, they stink as network delivery formats for pure bandwidth reasons. Their signal to noise ratio is too low.