The unfortunate truth is that word processors don't do a whole lot more today
than they did 10 years ago, so to encourage continued upgrading, software
makers wield the planned obsolescence of document formats like a sledgehammer.
So wersquo;ve learned to communicate with each other and are now enjoying the
brave new Information Age, in which most any computer can communicate with most
any other computer, right? Not completely. Certainly we've come a long way
forward in being able to interchange information from the ldquo;bad old
daysrdquo; when specific equipment was required to access specific information.
But Nirvana it is not: at the opening of the 21st century data formats have
become a competitive weapon, and proprietary protocols are being wielded in a
way that leads us back towards a world of less interoperability, not more. The
first time I ever laid my fingers on a word processor it was in 1986 at the
keyboard of a Commodore 64. Those early documents I wrote are long gone now,
denizens of the great bit bucket in the sky. It was the early days of
mainstream computing, and at the time each computing platform was essentially
an island: there was no hope of getting the Commodore to communicate with the
IBM PCs of the time, much less the revolutionary new Apple Macintosh upon its
entry into the market a year or two later. For that matter, Macs and PCs
operated in relative isolation too.
Fast forward to 2003, where we ndash; students and office drones in particular
ndash; spend the better part of a day glued to the business end of a laptop
writing and receiving documents, and the worldwide internet traffic in text
docs, spreadsheets, and of course email, exceeds 180 petabits per day (A
petabit is one quadrillion 1s or 0s). So wersquo;ve learned to communicate
with each other and are now enjoying the brave new Information Age, in which
most any computer can communicate with most any other computer, right? Not
completely. Certainly we've come a long way forward in being able to
interchange information from the ldquo;bad old daysrdquo; when specific
equipment was required to access specific information. But Nirvana it is not:
at the opening of the 21st century data formats have become a competitive
weapon, and proprietary protocols are being wielded in a way that leads us back
towards a world of less interoperability, not more. This dangerous trend will
shape the future of the computing ndash; and therefore the business ndash;
world for as long as we allow it.
Document formats Start with electronic documents. The papers I wrote in the
late 1980s are no longer accessible to me, as I no longer have either the
computer or the software to read them, and given the small market share,
itrsquo;s in no companyrsquo;s financial interest to help me, as the
ldquo;Commodore 64 document conversionrdquo; market is not exactly booming
these days. But owners of relatively modern hardware aren't necessarily better
off. Did you write some papers prior to 1995 on a previous version of
Microsoft Word? There is no guarantee Word XP will be able to import them
cleanly or even at all. Write your paper on a late 1980s word processor by the
name of Wordstar? That company is long gone, so unless you were paying
attention in the short period of time that both Wordstar and its competition
co-existed, you are up the creek. Remember an older program called Write Now?
It's gone as well, and any documents written on that program are no longer
accessible by any known software package. Even modern software is at risk.
Adobe Framemaker documents are only readable by, well, Adobe Framemaker, and
don't think Microsoft is going to want to help you change. What makes you
think you'll be able to access the masterpieces you crafted as part of your
SAIS career? I may decide that it's not worth it to carry along my macro
problem sets from one version to another and let's face it ndash; the things I
wrote in the 1980s are of no interest to anyone, but most businesses are not
afforded the same luxury of letting old documents disappear. That means using
planned obsolescence to force corporations to keep their document formats up to
date is a big money maker. Not surprisingly, it doesn't bode well for the
consumer, especially if to upgrade to the new, powerful version of Word XP you
need to a newer computer. Feel like you've been forced into an expensive
upgrade cycle? You have. The unfortunate truth is that word processors don't
do a whole lot more today than they did 10 years ago, so to encourage continued
upgrading, software makers wield the planned obsolescence of document formats
like a sledgehammer. For the software publisher there are two benefits: first,
it guarantees a revenue stream from individuals and corporations that need to
continually purchase the latest and greatest in order to maintain the ability
to read their own documents. Second, at each upgrade it provides an
opportunity to lock other software makers out of the market. The format for
Microsoft Word documents is one of the industry's best kept trade secrets, up
there with the Colonel's secret recipe and the ingredients to Coca Cola. Mac
owners' familiar cry that their software never does a perfect job at reading
documents written by PC owners, then, should be no surprise at all. They have
two options: spend a couple hundred dollars for Microsoft Word for Macs, or
throw in the towel and buy a PC (which will come with Microsoft Windows,
conveniently). Linux users and those poor souls still using OS/2 are out of
luck. Most software by the competition is able to read Word docs ldquo;more or
lessrdquo; But not perfectly. And that's just the way Microsoft would like
it! It's a big stimulus to go mainstream. The coup de grace, then, should be
obvious to you by now: if you decide to overcome the problem by simply going
with the flow and doing your work in Microsoft Word, you've effectively
committed to that format. Because it requires too much effort and too much
money to change, and because it's too imperfect a process anyway, you are
stuck. Your data has been taken captive.
Email If it seems like major software manufacturers are fighting for the rights
to take your documents captive, it should come as no surprise to you that the
same battle is being waged for your email. There are dozens of programs that
let you download, read, and send email, Outlook being by far the most popular,
but Mozilla, Eudora, and Opera are others. They differ in many aspects but are
similar in only one: they make it ridiculously easy to import your mail and
addresses and extremely difficult to export them. In effect, they raise the
cost of your being able to defect to the products of another manufacturer.
Outlook, for that matter, has been the vector for hundreds of viruses and
Trojan horses that cause mischief and damage on your computers. Why continue
to use it? Well, certainly it's popular because it has made the task of
dealing with your mail a lot less burdensome. But the price is this: it's made
it harder than ever to move away to anything else.
The World Wide Web The most insidious use of document formats and protocols has
occurred on the ostensibly free and open World Wide Web. The World Wide Web
since its inception was intended to be an open platform that allowed anyone
anywhere using any computer and any web browser could access the same
information. In fact, it was that openness and universality made the web
indispensable in the first place. But the browser war ndash; in which Microsoft
and Netscape battled over which browser would be more popular ndash; put an end
to that (Who won? Well, which browser do you use? 97% of the world uses
Microsoft Internet Explorer today). A decade after its birth, badges
proclaiming ldquo;this website best viewed with Netscape 6rdquo; or ldquo;this
website best viewed with Internet Explorer (download here)rdquo; are still
around. How is it possible that one web browser can better render a standard
language - HTML - than another? By tweaking the protocols. As recently as a
2002, Microsoft attempted to make its MSN website inaccessible to web surfers
using anything other than its own Internet Explorer. Web surfers using any
other browser ndash; Safari (Macintosh), Opera, Netscape, Mozilla ndash; were
sent to web page informing them their inferior software would deny them the
proper ldquo;experiencerdquo; and a convenient download link. The inventor of
the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, in an interview with Silicon Valley
magazine, railed against this and similar attempts to link information to
particular technologies. ldquo;I have fought since the beginning of the Web
for its openness: that anyone can read Web pages with any software running on
any hardware. This is what makes the Web itself. This is the environment into
which so many people have invested so much energy and creativity. When I see
any Web site claim to be only readable using particular hardware or software, I
cringe ...rdquo; Little has changed. Not long afterwards, Microsoft updated
its website with code that determined which browser was being used to access
it. Opera users were treated to a page whose formatting was ugly and unusable;
users of Internet Explorer got the pretty one (in a hilarious protest, Opera
responded by releasing a browser that, when pointed to Microsoft's web page,
would replace all the page's text with the language of the Muppet Show's
Swedish chef: ldquo;bork bork bork!rdquo; The point was taken.
Web Pages Microsoft's Front Page software is a most egregious offender. While
it been marvelously effective in helping home users and small business develop
simple web pages, it builds the pages with code that makes them render more
clearly in Internet Explorer. And if you want them to include page counters,
search scripts, and the like, then you are forced to find a provider that will
host your website on a server that offers ldquo;Front Page extensionsrdquo;
(which only run on Microsoft's IIS server software, which needs a Microsoft
operating system ... get it?).
Insist on Open Standards Transferring your email, updating your spreadsheets,
rendering websites in a vendor-neutral way: it sounds petty, the result of
corporate infighting. You should be able to choose the software you like or
want and be done with it. But that lassitude is exactly what software makers
are counting on to garner market share, and to make certain you remain a loyal
customer, your data has been taken hostage: no insignificant allegation in the
age of information. Browser wars aside, you should not have to be locked into
an expensive upgrade cycle if you don't want to be, and you shouldn't have to
upgrade to the latest version of some program just because all your cohorts
have. The fact is, building document compatibility into software is trivial,
and the only reason why a new version of the software won't read an old
version's documents is ldquo;business.rdquo; What defense does the ordinary
citizen have? The answer is simple but it's not easy: free and open standards.
The internet was founded on clear, open, and commonly shared protocols. For
that matter, developing compatibility in the early computing world (we're
talking 1960s-1970s here) was of primary importance to the visionaries who
sought to ndash; and did ndash; overcome incompatibilities in formats and
protocols. It's due to their hard work and insight that we have an internet to
unite us. How paradoxical then, that so many organizations are now trying
their hardest to fragment us! Here's the hard part: to put the consumer back
in the driver's seat, simply don't use non-open protocols. In this sense, open
means that the language with which a document is created is freely distributed
and understood and any company that wants to use it in their software is free
to do so. The opposite is proprietary protocols, over which one company
maintains control and charges for the use of or doesn't permit the use of at
all. For documents that are mostly text, RTF (ldquo;rich textrdquo;) is a
document standard that any word processor anywhere can read and write and is
the only format you can send to anyone with the confidence they'll be able to
read it. For more complicated things, only PDFs are considered open because
anyone can read them on any computing platform. For images, JPGs and PNGs are
open. For music, MP3s are popular enough to be almost everywhere but they're
not open. Oggs are open, WMFs are not. The problem is that in many areas of
computing no open protocols exist. This is the fight consumers must continue
to wage, for until we insist on open and free formats and protocols, everything
we write, calculate, or create is made available to us ndash; our own work
ndash; only as long as the corporations that designed our software decide it's
worth their while to stay in business. Is that important? Go ask the folks
who used to use Wordstar.
This article first appeared in La Dotta magazine in Spring 2004 (now gone).
You can download it in PDF format from this site.
