NixLuver's Journal: How to support diversity in the Information Technology space

Anyone who reads my posts will know that I'm not a Microsoft fanboy. I don't, however, want to see Microsoft "destroyed" or "broken up". I'm not interested in 'attacking' successful companies. I don't think the rules should be any different for successful companies, either.

This may seem odd coming from someone who is such a vociferous opponent of the M$ mindset. Let me explain, and it will all come clear.

I think that the major issue that prohibits the adoption of better technology is what I call, for lack of a better term, 'divisive psuedotechnology'. What I am talking about is the artificial alteration of protocols, data storage formats, and memory structures that makes the transfer of data from one format or program to another very difficult. Take, for instance, the industry recognition that Microsoft's biggest competitor for Office is "last year's version". What this means is that Microsoft knows that the 'features' they introduced in the newest version are basically irrelevant to the largest percentage of their userbase; so they have to change data formats in order to force people to upgrade (eventually). The occlusion and polymorphism of the formats present a clear barrier to entry for a given competitor's package.

We don't have to change the rules for Microsoft to avoid this situation. I think that if you feel that a company should not be allowed to have monopoly power, the solution is not to penalize that company with special rules, but to write rules that make it difficult or impossible to achieve that market pre-eminence. In the case of IT, I think that a very simple rule would accomplish this task to a large degree; require (legally) all data storage formats and protocols to be public information. This forces all software companies to focus on the part of the job that is important - functionality. This way Microsoft (and others - they are just the example at hand, far from the only culprits!) cannot 'lock out' competition by simply changing or obfuscating their data storage format or network protocol. This means that software companies will have to make real improvements to software rather than simply introducing version incompatibilities and forcing upgrades by end-of-support combined with version incompatiblity. Upgrades then become a value proposition, and a company has to do real innovation in order to get new users or convince existing users to upgrade.

This will never happen, of course, because of the vested interest in the cash contributions of the tech industry. Microsoft and friends contribute to the campaign funds of politicians, and those politicians enact legislation like the DMCA, or make copyright infringement a crime rather than a civil tort.

Regardless, the moral of this story is this: Whether you choose proprietary software, open source software, or Free software, choose software that uses open standards for data storage and protocols. As a systems integrator, I can tell you with conviction that the choice of a proprietary protocol or data storage format is always a bad idea in the long run, because at some point any non-trivial system will have to interact with another non-trivial system, and those proprietary formats and protocols will eat up disproportionate amounts of time and money constructing expensive and buggy 'glue' systems. If enough of us make these decisions appropriately, it will cease to be profitable to create systems with artificial obsolescence and forced non-value upgrades.