What's Up, .DOC?

One of the things that's aided Microsoft's domination of the PC-software market over the last several years, has been .DOC. Once you get enough copies of MS Office out there, people start creating their documents in MS Word's file format, and then sharing them with other people, you pretty much need a program that can open those files. Since MS has kept the format of Word document files a closely-guarded trade secret, that's been a big obstacle to developers of competing products like WordPerfect or OpenOffice. They've figured out most of it, but the translation is always imperfect. It's one of the reasons why even Mac users use MS Word more than any other word processor.

So it was big news when Microsoft announced they were abandoning the trade secret of .DOC for the open standard of XML, and they'd even publish the schema that their XML would use.

For those who don't follow the geek trade press: XML is a standard, independently-produced format for how to store data, which allows any XML-enabled program to understand data stored by another other XML-enabled program, in much the same way that any web browser can read and interpret HTML documents. An MS Word document stored in XML format could easily be opened by any word processor that knows XML.

Or not.

The other shoe just dropped. Microsoft is filing for patents on how MS Word stores data using XML. So instead of being a technological challenge to figure out how to open MS Word documents, it would be a violation of patent law. While it may be possible to figure out a way to open the documents without violating Microsoft's patents, the only way to test that would be in court, not in the development lab. Guess which is more expensive, time-consuming, and bet-the-company risky?

What this means to you and me is that now is the time to find a replacement for MS Office. The current versions of packages such as WordPerfect Office, OpenOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, AppleWorks, Ability Office, etc. can all open your current Microsoft Offfice documents pretty well, but the odds of them (or even future versions of them) opening your Office 2003 or later documents are getting rather slim. It's never been easier to switch than it is right now, and if these patents are approved, it'll never be this easy again. For more information, see Just Say NO to Microsoft, a rather comprehensive guide to alternatives to Microsoft products, to which I am... a contributor.

Incidentally, this is yet another example of the danger of software patents. The US Patent Office was originally set up to help inventors working on, say, a better mousetrap, or a device for recording sounds on a piece of vinyl, and to help the public in the process. The inventor would get exclusive rights to the invention for several years, in exchange for sharing the details of how it works with the world.

But as the pace of technological change has increased, the length of patent terms has as well. They now last 20 years in most cases, so by the time they expire, they're of little use to anyone. Suppose Apple had patented the point-and-click interface technique of the Macintosh 20 years ago. Microsoft wouldn't have been able to introduce Windows until after the Superbowl this year. As bad as MS has been, imagine how bad Apple would have been with a total monopoly on desktop operating systems for the past 20 years.

In the last few decades especially, the patent process has become a tool for big businesses to stomp out their competition (by filing for patents on technology that others are already using), or for start-ups that don't actually produce anything but patents they can demand royalties for. Patents are filed - and approved - for obvious "inventions" like one-click shopping (by Amazon.com), or embedding a live program in a web page (by Eolas). And apparently it's going to gives a company like Microsoft control over your access to the data in your documents. Unless you use software that doesn't restrict you that way.