I’ve been playing with this post for a while. The motivation behind it is a conversation I had a while ago with a SharePoint developer, about why I thought Microsoft perhaps don’t have the user’s best interests at heart when they act. I want to try and clarify why I think this, and to try and work through why I made such an ineloquent argument for it at the time.
My argument
We were talking about lock-in and, in particular, why I thought Microsoft and Adobe were particularly evil in this regard. When pressed, the example I chose was that Microsoft changed file formats with Office 2007, bringing in the dreaded .docx and .xslx formats. This move, I suggested, was to make interoperability with previous versions hard, forcing people onto an upgrade path as they started to receive more of these new files from other people, either within the organisation or, more likely, from outside. The SharePoint guy countered this with the argument that they provided a tool to open these new files in old versions of Office – and they did this ON THE SAME DAY. This took me by surprise a bit — they had indeed done this — and we parted ways with me wondering if I’d got them wrong and him thinking that I was another flaky Free Software guy who just ‘didn’t get it’.
This has bugged me for far longer than it should have, but a long bike journey home today has given me some insight.
The McDonalds way
McDonalds are well known for their ruthless approach to world domination. You don’t meet many people who won’t join in a sneery rant against them, and most people think they are not to be taken at face value (at least in my experience). McDonalds have always offered a ‘healthy’ option – salad, carrot sticks, juice instead of coke, etc – but not as a genuine choice, as a way to appease the minority (they have a term for this that they use but I can;t remember it off the top of my head). The way it works is that the whole family want to go to McDonalds, except for the teenage daughter (again, their approach, not my example). The salad is there to give her something to eat while the rest of the family have the food that they really want to sell. They don’t care in the slightest if the daughter wouldn’t go there on her own, they just want to make sure she doesn’t stop everyone else going.
And this is what Microsoft did with their conversion tool. They don;t care if the single users upgrade or not, or even if they use cracked versions of their software. The people they want using it are the big corporations, the high-volume licenses. If they can offer something that stops the minority holding up the majority moving over, they win. Their intention is not that an office of 800 installs the converter on every machine, there intention is that the office of 800 upgrades all their users. If you have to go round and install the converter, why not bite the bullet and buy the upgrade now – you will anyway, so save two rounds of installation. The market for the converter is the home user and freelance who need a way to read the new file format without increasing the workload of the majority. By saying that the converter exists, Microsoft take away the one barrier to upgrade – you can use the new file format and get all the benefits while the minority, the whinging luddites who refuse to upgrade, have a tool to let them read your files, at no cost or effort to you.
The release of the converter on the day of release of Office 2007 was intended to drive people to upgrade, not as a tool to let them choose not to.
On the other side of the coin, Microsoft is using the exact same tactic to try and block OpenOffice. Despite the open document format being an open and visible standard, Word does not support it out of the box. Because Word is proprietary it is very hard to write the converter so OpenOffice cannot appease the minority, meaning the hurdle to move to OpenOffice (that other users can’t open the files) is in place and high enough to act as a barrier. If Microsoft were genuinely trying to be open (with their new format), and helpful (by releasing a converter) they would also support other people’s file formats wouldn’t they?
And what now?
It’s good to get that off my chest. It’s been bugging me for a while that something which I held as a fundamental truth – Microsoft changed formats as a deliberate sales tactic – was both not universally thought true, and seemingly so easy to dismiss. I think my reasoning above is very close to the truth; and part of me thinks that, if it is, someone at Microsoft deserves a pay-rise for spinning it into something that was seen as a Good Thing to have done. The other, larger, part of me thinks that I am doing the right thing opting for free software, and that there is a good reason to think that the areas I work in – charity and education – should be looking to move away from proprietary tools like office.
The difficulty is in how to get this message across, and how to convince people to switch to open tools while Microsoft keep the barrier to switching high. A report I read said that UK schools could save 80% of their IT budget because they use proprietary tools to do tasks that free tools could do equally as well. There are areas where free tools don’t match up, but think what development could be done if schools saved 80% of their budget on software – even 20% of that reinvested could make a huge difference to a lot of free software projects, perhaps eroding the other 20% over time.
Anyone want to set up a social enterprise to take this forward?