Users of software for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations could find themselves experiencing technological lock-in if the Office Open Extensible Markup Language is adopted as another open standard. Some of the detrimental effects of such a lock-in are increased costs of technology access, dependency on a single vendor and restricted user choices.

Views expressed are personal. We are grateful to Dr Jai for the valuable inputs on the technical issues.

P Vigneswara Illavarasan (evignesh@gmail.com) is assistant professor, department of humanities and social sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and Shantanu Gupta (shantanu.gupta@gmail.com) is a graduate student at the department of management studies, IIT Delhi.

T

OOXML is a proposed open standard for word-processing documents, presentations and spreadsheets that can be implemented on multiple applications on multiple platforms [Ngo 2006]. It was developed by Microsoft based on its proprietary product suite, Office 2007 and was presented for the fast track approval to International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) by the European Computers Manufacturers Association (ECMA) in December 2006. During the first round of voting, in September 3, 2007, member countries at the ISO did not approve OOXML as an open standard. India voted negative and raised more than 80 technical objections. ECMA is expected to respond to the comments and solve the inadequacies before the final voting scheduled during February last week at Geneva [for further details, see Dataquest 2007]. If all the objections are addressed, OOXML will become another open standard along with the Open Document Format (ODF) which was approved in 2005.

ODF was founded by the Star Division, in 1999 which was later acquired by the Sun Microsystems. In 2000, ODF was transferred to the open source software domain. The process of developing ODF as a formal document standard was initiated format, non-proprietary, free and can be implemented independently. It guarantees long-term access to data without legal or technical barriers. It is being implemented by various vendors in the open and free source office suites.

Technological Lock-in?

Technological lock-in is one of the widely discussed topics under the study of technology adoption. It refers to the process by which users are considerably dependent on one technology and switching cost to some other technology is high apart from a steep learning curve. Vendor lockin comes into effect when users are dependent on only one vendor who owns and controls the technology utilised by the users.

To quote: Arthur (1989)

...When two or more increasing-return technologies ‘compete’ then for a ‘market’ of potential adopters, insignificant events may by chance give one of them an initial advantage in adoptions. This technology may then improve more than others, so it may appeal to a wider proportion of potential adopters. It may therefore become further adopted and further improved. Thus a technology that by chance gains an early lead in adoption may eventually ‘corner the market’ of potential adopters, with the other techno logies becoming locked out (p 116).

There is a possibility that locked out technologies are superior to the incumbent ones. An economic history analysis [David 1985] showed that QWERTY keyboard format became dominant over other efficient formats in spite of the fact that it was not the most superior one. Also, if one of the two rival technologies is sponsored (controlling property rights of the techno logy), it may be adopted despite inferior in qua lity [Katz and Shapiro 1986]. Also an individual’s lock-in extends to institutional lock-in where organisations also tend to get locked-in with certain technology or vendor.

december 1, 2007 Economic & Political Weekly

INSIGHT

The lock-in phenomenon cannot be igno red when it is not socially optimal or entire users group or institutions are dependent on one vendor for supplying that dominant technology. For instance, one cannot accept the situation where even a single user needs to pay for using the QW-ERTY keyboard irrespective of the application (computers or type writers) he or she is using. In this kind of situation, intervention of the government is required to reach the socially optimal technology. Particularly, when several technologies appear as choices in the market, policy initiatives should be driven by inclusive and welfare orientations.

Establishing industry wide open standards help to circumvent technological lock-in by a single proprietary technology. Open standards are:

...transparent descriptions of data and behaviour that form the basis of interoperability. Interoperability is the ability of different software systems to exchange information, resulting in equivalent users outcomes. In practice, the interoperability means that users are not locked to any software (technological) system – they can substitute one standards-compliant systems for other [Dalziel 2006, p 4].

Hence, it is important to understand whether the proposed OOXML is a genuine case of open standard. Following are the claims made by the Microsoft (2007a) in the process of getting open standard status for the OOXML, and criticisms of the same.

Open and Royalty Free

The OOXML formats are based on OOXML technologies which are universally accessible. The specification for the formats and schemes are published and made available under the same royalty-free licence that exists today for the Microsoft Office 2003 Reference Schemes, and that is openly offered and available for broad industry use [Keizer 2006].

There is, however, a catch in the licence agreement which says that we can use the technology on offer by Microsoft, but only if we agree “not to allow sublicensing”. This means that this technology is not compatible with the socially acceptable licensing systems in use for commodity systems, like the copyleft. Though OOXML appears as non-proprietary, it restricts

Economic & Political Weekly december 1, 2007

such freedom to modify and distribute [Jones 2005].

Interoperable

With industry-standard XML at the core of the OOXML formats, exchanging data between Microsoft Office applications and enterprise business systems is simplified. Without requiring access to the office appli cations, solutions can alter information inside an Office document or create a document by using standard tools and technologies capable of manipulating XML. The new formats enable to build archives of documents without using Office code [Microsoft 2007, 2007a].

Since “Open XML was designed from the start to be capable of faithfully representing the pre-existing corpus of wordprocessing documents, presentations, and spreadsheets that are encoded in binary formats defined by Microsoft Corpo ration” [Ngo 2006], the format specification provide space for other software vendors to create office applications to view and manipulate the documents. However, this is almost impossible for other office suites to inter-operate without understanding of the binary formats which are proprietary. Also there needs to be a mapping tool between the binary file and the OOXML file formats to help users achieve interoperability as claimed.

Microsoft has successfully completed the OOXML Translator project that will help translate between the office OOXML formats and the ODF [Mook 2007]. This will give users more choice in terms of different formats available for their use.

However, there are no such converters available for other office suite components like spreadsheets or presentations [LaMonica 2007]. Also the translators are not bundled along with the Office 2007. In addition, the format in which the documents are saved in the Office 2007 suite is incompatible with Mac Office application [Macworld 2006], with the users still waiting for a compatibility pack similar to that provided for Windows users. With further delay in the Office Converter [Wilcox 2007], it has to be seen whether the true interoperability claims by Microsoft would stand the test when the formats for its Mac and Windows Office suites are not interoperable.

Also as a proposed standard, OOXML is expected to use the pre-existing standards. But it does not make use of already approved standard ODF. It does not provide any reason why it is not doing so, even though it is overlapping with the ODF [Nagarjuna 2007].

Secure

The openness of the OOXML formats translates to more secure and transparent files. Users can share documents confidently because they can easily identify and remove personally identifiable information and business-sensitive information, such as user names, comments, and file paths.

The entire OOXML format was developed by Microsoft itself, and there was no participation from the individual members, and proceedings of the specification formulation is not kept open [Andersen 2006]. A 6,000 page long specification document was kept open for only 30 days to be reviewed by the members. Also, no extended peer review has been done till now to justify the security status. In contrast, ODF took six years to be declared as an open standard.

With OOXML being a part of the Office package for Windows Vista, Microsoft has built into Vista, the “trusted computing” ability to lock down Office files via Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology so that no unauthorised dealer will be able to decrypt and read them [Doctorow 2006]. The Trusted Computing DRM technology which is built into Vista and Office 2007 suite would lead to the documents being used by only those people who have these or later versions of Microsoft products, or third party products which are Microsoft authorised compliant [Howorth, 2006]. DRM technology could well lock-in users to Microsoft products by determining whether or not users could access documents without first buying Microsoft or its sanctioned products.

Also, there has been no proven complete implementation of OOXML by any other software vendor or firm other than Microsoft. Also, the size of the standard details is too large, about 6000+ pages making it complex for the third parties to implement support for the standard [Economic Times 2007a].