European antitrust regulators are investigating whether Microsoft abused its desktop software market dominance in its effort to standardize the Office Open XML file formats.
The European Commission's antitrust regulatory body sent queries to several European countries to see how the standards-setting process was working, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.
The investigation is still ongoing, he added.
The Wall Street Journal in February reported that the investigation had started.
In a letter seen by CNET News.com, European regulators queried the national standards body in Norway to gain details into the local standardization process. Specifically, the European Commission sought information on attempts to influence the debate or vote over the standards proposal.In response, Standards Norway said there was heated debate but not any "inappropriate behavior that endangered our process," according to a document seen by CNET News.com.
Office Open XML (OOXML) is a technical specification that describes the inner workings of how to read and create Microsoft Office documents. In 2005, Microsoft started a process to standardize Open XML in an effort to appeal to government customers who favor standards-based software and improve interoperability with third-party products.
On Wednesday, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) announced that Open XML received enough for votes for it to be ratified as a standard.
The Commission query to Standards Norway came in February, before the results of the ISO ballot were published. The approval of Open XML reversed a previous attempt in September at standards approval that failed.
There was intense lobbying by Microsoft, IBM, and their partners to influence the international delegates from national standards bodies who participated in the voting.
In some cases, people favorable to Microsoft's pro-Open XML position joined standards bodies late in the process, bringing protests from Microsoft foes.
In addition, there have been reports of irregularities in the run-up to the most recent voting, which ended Saturday.
The head of the committee established to form Norway's position on Open XML wrote a letter to the ISO, complaining that the country's changed yes vote did not represent the views of most committee members.
Standards Norway, however, issued a statement indicating that its position will remain yes.
Microsoft's director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow, said on Tuesday that he expects IBM and its allies will launch "an orchestrated process attack in the hopes of overturning the ratification of Open XML, or at least to discredit what has come out of this long, global process."
In response, an IBM spokesperson on Wednesday said: "As always, the sentiment has to be organic. It will be up to people and organizations in individual countries to decide whether they want to try to appeal this."
Update 3:47 p.m. Pacific: Microsoft's general manager of standards and interoperability Tom Robertson said that Microsoft, too, has been queried as part of the investigation.
He said that Microsoft will "fully cooperate" with any investigation from the Commission.
In response to the accusations of stacking committees, Robertson said that IBM and other competitors have done exactly what Microsoft is accused of doing. For example, an employee from Google, which opposed Open XML standardization, joined the Danish national committee only three days before a vote.
"It seems that one of the main concerns that people have raised about the process is the broad-based participation in the standards body deliberation," he said. "I think it's ironic IBM is complaining about new members in national standards bodies when they have been working around the clock to get people to join."
Clarification: Robertson said that a Google employee joined the Finnish committee but a Microsoft spokesperson said that it was in Denmark. The quote was changed.
Now that Office Open XML (OOXML) has been certified as an ISO standard, there is a possibility that the vote leading to that result will be challenged. It seems Microsoft is already counting on it.
The ISO on Wednesday officially announced that Open XML received enough votes to become a standard, reversing a previous attempt in September that failed.
Those complaints could lead to a formal appeal of the votes which, under ISO rules, need to be lodged by those countries in the next two months.
Microsoft's director of corporate standards, Jason Matusow, wrote in a blog on Tuesday that challenges to the overall process will likely come. The source? IBM.
"We now see IBM/et al driving an orchestrated process attack in the hopes of overturning the ratification of Open XML, or at least to discredit what has come out of this long, global process," Matusow wrote.
IBM representatives heavily lobbied national standards bodies against approval in the run-up to the vote. But the company itself cannot lodge a formal complaint, a company spokesman said Wednesday.
"As always, the sentiment has to be organic. It will be up to people and organizations in individual countries to decide whether they want to try to appeal this," he said.
Instead, IBM is calling for reform of the standards process and "harmonization" between Open XML and ODF, the OpenDocument Format (ODF), another standardized format.
"While fully cognizant of these current results, I'm energized to take the bigger fight for openness to the next level with the thousands of individuals who are now convinced that the standards system needs fixing, and soon. I hope you'll take part," wrote Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards, who has been a vocal opponent of Open XML standardization.
The case of Norway
On Tuesday, the head of the committee in charge of forming Norway's position on Open XML, Steve Pepper, sent a letter to the ISO complaining that Norway's Yes position did not reflect the views of most participants in that committee.
Standards Norway responded to those criticisms, explaining why Norway changed its vote to Yes even though not all of its issues with the specification were addressed.
The letter from Standards Norway appears to indicate that the country's position will not be changed or suspended during an appeal. An ISO representative on Tuesday said that the ISO had not received a formal protest from its Norwegian delegation, indicating that Pepper's complaint did not represent the country's overall position.
In his blog, Microsoft's Matusow reproduced an English translation of Standards Norway's response to Pepper's complaint as well as letter from Germany's national standards organization.
In Germany, too, there were accusations of improprieties in what was a close vote, but Germany's standards organization said it will not change its Yes position to No or Abstain.
"The steering committee has accepted the process as compliant with the rules with a majority of 7 to 6 and therefore it has seen no reason to lift the decision of the working group. If the majority of the working group would have been convinced that the process of dealing with and voting were noncompliant to the rules then the German vote would have been changed to abstain," according to a translated statement.
The voting record shows that 75 percent of countries voted to approve and 14 percent voted against. To pass, it needed a two-thirds majority and not more than a quarter opposed.
As such, a change in one country's vote would not affect the overall result.
Meanwhile, one of the participants in Standards Norway's Open XML vote, Geir Isene, speculated that the European Union will investigate what happened in that country.
In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that European antitrust regulators were investigating earlier steps in the ISO voting process.
As expected, the ISO on Wednesday announced that Office Open XML (OOXML) has been approved as a standard, marking the end a long and sometimes contentious path.
The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued a press release with the details of a vote that showed Open XML receiving 75 percent approval and 14 percent disapproval. It needed two-thirds approval and not more than 25 percent disapproval to pass.
The effort to make Open XML an ISO standard did not pass a ballot in September, which precipitated a follow-on Ballot Resolution Meeting in February where, after redundancies were eliminated, over 1,000 issues were considered, according to the ISO.
Following the BRM, delegates from participants had the option of changing their position from No or Abstain to Yes--something that enough did to have the effort pass.
Microsoft originally submitted the Open XML file formats to standards organization Ecma International in 2005. Ecma then proposed the specification to ISO in its Fast Track process, which many considered to be too fast for a complicated specification.
ISO standards status means that software that uses Open XML, notably Microsoft's Office products, will be more attractive to governments and large corporate customers that prefer to purchase ISO-certified goods.
It also means that development of the specification will be done through the ISO, which counts members from over 100 countries. There were 87 countries which participated in the Open XML vote.
Microsoft and other software companies that support Open XML in their products, such as Apple and Novell, are expected to conform to the standard as it changes over time.
The entire endeavor was opposed by many, although certainly not all, open-source advocates who feared that standards status would give Microsoft more market power.
The run-up to the vote was marked by intense lobbying from Microsoft, IBM, and their business partners.
There were reports of what have been called irregularities in the vote which ended Saturday. The head of the committee which formed Standards Norway's position lodged a complaint saying that the yes vote did not reflect the opposition of the majority of the committee.
However, ISO spokesperson Roger Frost on Tuesday said that the organization has not received a complaint from its Norwegian ISO member, referring the matter to Standards Norway.
Early reports Sunday indicate that Office Open XML (OOXML) appears to have enough votes to be certified an ISO standard. An official tally is not expected until Monday.
As the votes come in from the 87 national standards bodies, so have a number of complaints of irregularities and strong-arm tactics in different countries, including Poland and Norway.
The OpenMalaysia blog, run by openness advocates and students, found that the ballot, which closed Saturday night, had the necessary combination of more than two-thirds approve votes and less than a quarter for disapprove.
Lawyer and standards expert Andrew Updegrove, an advocate for rival standard OpenDocument, found the same conclusion, based on official statements and reports from participants.
If confirmed by the ISO, the vote is a victory for Microsoft and other industry backers of Open XML at Ecma, the standards body that submitted Open XML to ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission).
ISO certification will make products that use Open XML, officially called DIS 29500, more attractive to government customers concerned with long-term archives of digital documents. It could also be more appealing to developers who want to build products based on those file formats.
Calls for review?
However, people are already speculating on blogs that there will be challenges to some of the votes from national standards bodies.
The vote, which closed Saturday, followed a ballot resolution meeting (BRM) in February that was meant to address outstanding technical issues with the 6,000-page document and move to consensus.
In some cases, however, standards bodies did not change their vote to yes following the BRM. France, for example, has maintained its no vote, according to a newspaper report.
Some countries, including Venezuela, even changed from supporting the standardization to opposing it, an unusual move that underscores the political nature of the process.
In the run-up to this vote, there have been accounts of Microsoft employees or partners having undue influence on the results of national standards bodies, including Norway. Groklaw has a translation of a Computerworld Norge article, as well as accounts of close votes in Germany and Croatia.
Even before the end of voting on Saturday, participants and technology enthusiasts complained that Microsoft and other Open XML backers have exposed flaws in the ISO process. Ecma chose an accelerated fast-track process, which many view as inappropriate for a weighty technical specification that has what some consider unresolved legal questions.
Earlier stages of the multiyear standards bid reportedly raised questions with European Union antitrust regulators. The Wall Street Journal in February reported that the EU has looked into whether Microsoft misused its desktop software dominance in influencing the first attempt to certify Open XML at ISO in September, a measure which did not pass and precipitated Saturday's follow-on vote.
The United States is expected to recommend that Microsoft's Open XML file formats be ratified as an international standard, according to people involved in the process.
Two members of the technical committee tasked with setting the national position on a pivotal vote said the States will retain its "Approve" position in a vote to make Open XML a standard at the International Organization for Standards (ISO).
The chair of the committee, Patrick Durusau, who is also the editor of the rival OpenDocument standard, said that the controversy surrounding Microsoft's Open XML standards bid is being fueled by an irrational anti-Microsoft sentiment.
"What is puzzling in this day and age of quarterly reports and returns is that any corporate-governance structure would long tolerate spite as a business strategy. Or that investors would stay with companies that follow such strategies," Durusau wrote Friday (PDF).
The Executive Board of the U.S. technical committee, called INCITS, will make the final decision on that recommendation.
Microsoft started the process of trying to make Open XML an international standard at the ISO two years ago. Last fall, Open XML failed to pass a ballot of international standards delegates. But a meeting in Geneva earlier this month, called the Ballot Resolution Meeting, sought to resolve technical problems and move the specification closer to standardization.
Delegates from national standards bodies have until March 29 to vote on Open XML. If it gains enough support, it will be certified as a standard.
Doug Mahugh, a Microsoft senior product manager and member of the INCITS committee, said on Friday that the next step for the U.S. delegation is to hold a ballot on the recommendation.
In addition to inciting anti-Open XML campaigns, such as the NOOXML movement, Microsoft's handling of the process has dismayed many industry observers, who say the company inappropriately chose an accelerated process for a very complicated technical specification.
A number of attendees to the Ballot Resolution Meeting at the end of last month complained that many of the technical issues were not thoroughly examined and that the credibility of the ISO standard process has been damaged.
In one example, a delegate from Brazil said the country's plan to discuss backward compatibility was not addressed during the BRM.
The Burton Group has published a refreshingly nonpartisan analysis of XML-based document standards and formats, recommending that large organizations use Microsoft's Open XML format over competing standards ODF in most cases.
The report, published on Monday and available for free, tries to cut through the highly charged political environment while recognizing the huge financial stake in document formats.
It concludes that organizations that already use Microsoft's Office should use the Office Open XML (OOXML) file formats which are the default in Office 2007.
The authors also predict that OOXML will gain significant market adoption, which will pose a greater competitive threat to most open-source vendors.
The OpenDocument Format, or ODF, will continue to have a market influence. ODF, which is the default file format of the open-source OpenOffice suite, has steadily seen growing interest from government customers concerned with long-term access to documents.
But Burton Group argues that choosing OpenOffice or ODF is done primarily as an anti-Microsoft move.
"For now ODF should be seen as more of an anti-Microsoft political statement than an objective technology selection," according to the report.
ODF, developed at the U.S. standards group OASIS, is an ISO standard, a significant certification to government customers.
Microsoft is in the process of trying to gain ISO ratification for OOXML, which has been certified a standard at Ecma International, another standards body. An important technical resolution meeting is scheduled to take place in late February, which will influence whether OOXML becomes an ISO standard or not.
Caveat
The authors say that the vendor support for ODF--backed by Novell, IBM, and Sun Microsystems--is primarily a competitive strategy to loosen Microsoft's influence on XML-based documents. It says that Sun, which created the OpenOffice open-source project, continues to be the primary influence on technical development.
Microsoft, meanwhile, has created OOXML for its own financial gain but also because it knows that standards and interoperability are vital to its acceptance among government customers.
The study does offer one important caveat: Microsoft needs to live up to its commitments to make OOXML a standard that includes input from other vendors and customers.
"If Microsoft abuses standards initiatives, the market response will be swift and severe," the study predicts.
Meanwhile, attorney and ODF advocate Andrew Updegrove said that the announcement on Monday of another European Union antitrust investigation of Microsoft could jeapordize its OOXML standards bid. Part of the investigation looks at whether the company's file formats are "sufficiently interoperable" with competing products, like ODF, Updegrove notes in his blog.
Not supporting ODF natively--relying instead on third-party projects--could be viewed as insufficient, he said.
"By sticking exclusively with OOXML, Microsoft has been pursuing a high risk, high wire act ever since ODF was adopted by Massachusetts in 2005. Today, it appears that this strategy just (became) riskier," Updegrove wrote.
When U.S. presidential candidates start promoting their open-source and open-document platforms, you know that the open-source movement has finally arrived. I mean, what could be more flattering than to be someone's five-second sound bite?
OK, lots of things. But I still liked reading that Barak Obama has made open document formats part of his campaign, as he noted in a recent speech at Google:
We have to use technology to open up our democracy. It's no coincidence that one of the most secretive Administrations in history has favored special interests and pursued policies that could not stand up to sunlight. As President, I'll change that. I'll put government data online in universally accessible formats.
Namely, ODF. Maybe. Or not.
... Read moreAndrew Updegrove, an attorney who writes the Standards Blog, talked to representatives from the World Wide Web Consortium this week and found that the Compound Document Format (CDF) is not suitable for Office-style applications.
During the W3C's Technical Plenary Meeting earlier this week, Updegrove spoke to Chris Lilley, the go-to guy on CDF at the W3C. Lilley said the format was not designed for applications like spreadsheets and word processors and that CDF is meant for interoperability between other Web technologies.
The reason Updegrove inquired goes back to a news story, reported first here, and then discussed much on the Web. The article reported that members of the OpenDocument Foundation, an OpenDocument Format (ODF) advocacy group, have abandoned their work with ODF. Instead, they are now focusing on finding ways to convert documents between Microsoft Office Open XML and the CDF because of technical limitations with ODF, they said.
The fact that members of the OpenDocument Foundation have given up on the format was interpreted as a rift within the many people advocating for broader ODF adoption.
Updegrove, an ODF advocate himself, says they left for more than just technical reasons. Read the blog, published on Friday, for his explanation.
When it comes to document standards, it seems that one is never quite good enough.
Adding a twist to a high-stakes conflict over document formats, some advocates for OpenDocument, or ODF, are abandoning the standard in favor of the World Wide Web Consortium's Compound Document Formats standard.
The reason? Technical limitations in sharing ODF files with Microsoft Office applications.
"We can't meet our market requirements with OpenDocument," said Gary Edwards who started the OpenDocument Foundation last year. "The truth is OpenDocument was never designed to meet market requirements."
Edwards and his colleagues started a project early last year to build a plug-in that would convert between Microsoft's Office document formats and ODF. It was in response to a request for proposals from the state of Massachusetts which mandated the use of ODF.
He started the OpenDocument Foundation in order to get open-source project representation at OASIS, the standards body developing ODF.
Through his work trying to develop that plug-in, Edwards ran into a number of technical problems maintaining "fidelity" of documents when exchanging between Office formats and ODF.
As a result, his group has now set its sites on building a converter between Office and the WC3's Compound Document Formats (CDF), which is still in development. Early implementations of CDF have been designed for reading documents on mobile phones.
"The thing you notice about CDF right away is that you are not working in the confines of how OpenOffice implements lists and tables. ODF directly reflects how OpenOffice does things," Edwards said.
His comments echo what Microsoft executives have long said about ODF--that it's specific to OpenOffice, an open-source desktop application suite backed by Microsoft rivals IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Novell.
Jason Matusow, Microsoft's director of corporate standards, said that the decision by Edwards and his colleague Sam Hiser to pursue CDF reflects how numerous document formats are emerging for different purposes. In another example, the national standards bodies of China are advocating a format called Unified Office Format (UOF).
"All of this seems to make the point stronger than ever that when you are speaking about document formats, you are really speaking about an adjunct technology to the applications which are the real 'solutions' in this discussion," Matusow wrote in his blog.
Hiser said that the Open Document Foundation's position is controversial among advocates of ODF who, in general, want a viable alternative to Microsoft's Office Open XML or a single standard in ODF.
"We feel that if one ignores the 1/2-odd billion desktops out there (with Microsoft Office), then one is not solving anyone's particular pain-points. We kind of like your company's old Embrace & Extend concept," Hiser wrote in the comments of Matusow's blog.
Edwards argued that CDF is better suited than ODF for Web-resident documents from Web 2.0 and other hosted application providers.
"OpenDocument is not an Internet-ready file format. There are lots of reasons why this is not the case. To me, we've been fighting to bring Open Document to the Internet and it means changing the basic charter," he said. "With CDF, it can be done but it's got to have the big vendors supporting it."
The publisher Hachette Book Group USA, a member of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), has decided to go with the digital publishing organization's recommended standard for distributing books in digital format.
Starting with its December 2007 launch titles, HBG plans to release its bestsellers in the .epub eBook format, the company announced Friday.
The .epub is an XML file format for reflowable digital books that includes Open Publication Structure (OPS), Open Packaging Format (OPF) and Open Container Format (OCF).
Hachette claims to be the first book publisher in the U.S. to adopt the .epub format. It also said the move will allow them to create eBooks more efficiently.
But the publisher could also just be following the money, as eBook popularity begins to rise.
About $8.1 million in eBooks were sold in the U.S. for the second quarter 2007 compared with $4 million for the same quarter the year before, according to statistics released by IDPF and Association of American Publishers in August.
Since bestseller I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert has already been released digitally, the book will not be re-released in the new .epub format, April Hattori, vice president of communications for HGB, said in an e-mail.
The news follows reports that the Booker Prize Foundation is in negotiations with several publishers and the British Council to get permission to release books on the Man Booker Prize shortlist for free download to anyone in the world. In August, HarperCollins also announced that it would be offering free book excerpts for iPhone owners.
