New file format causes Mass panic at Microsoft

By Steve Malone

Posted on 5 Sep 2005 at 10:58

The state of Massachusetts has caused a stir after it has emerged that it plans to adopt the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) open file format as a prerequisite for new productivity suites from 2007.

The decision to adopt OASIS formats, pioneered by the open source OpenOffice project, has naturally angered Microsoft whose Office suite dominates the commercial market.

Massachusetts is one of the most liberal states in the US and home to many of the US's leading academic establishments, including the world famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Peter Quinn, the state's CIO announced in a statement that a new draft version of its future specifications 'identifies the newly ratified OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) as our standard for office documents. Additional open and acceptable formats are also identified for other types of documents.'

OASIS is the basis for the XML and PDF file formats used by the open source productivity suite OpenOffice. The endorsement of OASIS has not gone down well in Seattle on the other side of the continent. Even though the development of OpenOffice as a serious challenger to Microsoft's dominant Office is still some way off, Microsoft clearly wants to prevent it becoming established as an alternative in Government in the same way that Linux has.

Writing in his blog, Brian Jones, Microsoft's Office Program Manager said he agreed with the principle that file formats should be open but claimed that the forthcoming formats for the upcoming Office 12 product were just that - if only Massachusetts had waited to see the beta of the new version coming out in a few months.

'Moving to document formats that are open, documented, and royalty-free is actually really valuable,' writes Jones. 'The default format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Office 12 will be completely open, meaning you aren't tied into Microsoft software to access your files. They will now totally belong to you and you have control over them. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity this gives to people to build solutions that operate on Office documents and it's royalty-free (no cost).'

Having put in his pitch for the new Office 12 formatting, Jones condemns the State's decision as being based on 'no thorough research' as the first beta of the new productivity suite will not be out for a another couple of months. ' I can't imagine that they would have made this decision as it actually provides the easiest path of moving from proprietary binary formats into open XML formats,' he writes.