OK, stop laughing. The Beast of Redmond has been breaking its word on a variety of things for as long as I can remember. Not news. The next version of Windows will take too long to get here and when it finally arrives will stink (Hello, Vista). At least Windows 7 looks promising, and it took way less time to crank out!
This, though . . . I’ve never seen Microsoft do anything as blatantly ugly as this.
You know how every time a new version of Microsoft Office comes out you ask yourself whether to bother upgrading? It stopped being about features a decade ago, right? Word and Excel don’t need new features, PowerPoint adds things that only real gurus can use, and let’s face facts: you don’t use Access.
I’m still chugging along with Office 2003, and with Office 2007 long past and Office 2010 on the horizon, I don’t see the event that’s gonna make me change my mind; I don’t care about the “Ribbon”, thanks, and the file format change means nothing to me since disk space is now all but free and the new format is really just the old format in a compressed file and there are free tools available that open them anyway.
Well, hang on:
Microsoft has just been granted a patent on technology built into the Office 2007 version of Word‘s file format. The not-so-funny thing about this is that Microsoft pursued this patent after first taking steps that looked like they were trying to create a real file “standard”. Pretty much the whole world got on board with this standard, and now Microsoft is in a position to go back and start playing rough with Google, OpenOffice, Zoho, and anyone else using the “open” technology.
Those big companies can defend themselves, and little companies are less and less able to compete in the software world anyway, so before this turns into a rant, let’s get to the point:
You Have To Protect Yourself.
The chance of Microsoft knocking on your door or even on IBM’s or General Electric’s looking for licensing fees is approximately zero. But the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, the folks who put the whole idea together, fell asleep at the switch, and are going to find themselves obsolete if their member companies aren’t protected from the wrath of Microsoft’s Patent Attorneys.
And you, too. Watch out for the “gotchas”. Change may be good, and staying ahead of its curve will take you a long way, but if you don’t manage change, one day you could find yourself looking at the same kind of problem that Microsoft is about to make for the rest of the software world.
