Poison Pill Poppers
by T. Colin Dodd
Despite stumbling on the way to winning approval for ISO standardization of its closed-standard ooxml document format, Micro$oft isn’t deviating from trying to position itself as a peacemaker, appearing to offer an olive branch in the ongoing document format wars by offering to support (or at least stop blocking) adoption of the Open Document Format so long as it “doesn’t restrict choice in formats.”
Restricting choice, as it is used here, can be roughly translated to mean something like, “eroding our stanglehold.” The way they spin it, adoption of the Open Document Format, based on open standards and completely free to use by anyone, will somehow limit users’ choice. So Microsoft is totally cool with ODF, so along as their closed-standard OOXML format somehow wins equivalent standing as an International standard, even though it is not an open standard.
Confused? Mission accomplished.
A similar, but better played anvil disguised as an olive branch maneuver was shown to internet radio operators last week as SoundExchange granted a “reprieve” from enforcement of the onerous royalty ruling handed down by the Copyright Royalty Board. It seems that even the music industry didn’t want internet radio to die.
In a dramatic, last-minute reversal Sound Exchange offered to negotiate more favorable royalty rates for webcasters if they agreed to implement Digital Rights Management technology to prevent “streamripping.”
That’s probably not a deal-breaker for most internet radio operators, but it further restricts a presently-held right of fair use (taping off the radio) for most listeners, and consolidates the music industry’s power online.
Bargaining from a position of strength is good PR, it seems, whether that strength is real or artifice.
July 19th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
What’s unique is, that despite Microsoft’s best lobbying and marketing efforts for MS-OOXML, I’m seeing more and more ordinary people speak out on forums who are just now beginning to understand how much of a bad deal MS-OOXML is for users.
Rob Wier makes a good point, taking Microsoft’s argument to its logical extreme — if two standards are better than one, why not three, four, ten, twenty? Let’s go back and standardize the formats of WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar, and so on, then everything is a “standard”!
Maybe we need someone to come up with a napkin drawing for this entire issue like the copyright example you posted above!
July 20th, 2007 at 3:19 am
The article is surprisingly full of typos: “docutment”, presumably triple quoting in “doesn’t “restrict choice in formats.”, OOXL.
Guess “Micro$oft” is also a tad childish.
If [some of] these weren’t intended, feel free to merge the patch and remove it.