You can respond to the consultation: How to respond.computerweekly.com wrote: Microsoft redeploys OOXML in open standards battle
Microsoft has been trying to persuade the British government to break its promise to back a single document format, Computer Weekly has learned.
If Microsoft's lobbying succeeds it will require the Cabinet Office to erase yet another crucial element of its flagship ICT Strategy, giving the software giant trump cards over the standard that set the terms of competition for its competitors.
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The government's ICT strategy made a single, open document format the primary objective of its open standards policy when it was published last year.
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Though Cabinet Office since retracted its open standards policy after lobbying from Microsoft on another issue, putting it out to public consultation, it has given no sign that its promised official document standard may also be up for grabs.
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By the time ISO had accredited the Open Document Format as an official standard in 2006, policy makers were beginning to realise how important open standards were in preventing monopolies like Microsoft's forming in the first place. Microsoft retaliated by steam-rolling its document format through the ISO approval process and making it available free of charge and without royalty claims or restrictions: it made it open.
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The compromise has already tainted ISO's reputation as standards authority. There was already a document standard when Microsoft asked ISO to approve its format. ISO justified its decision by claiming the market had called for another document standard. But the market that called for Microsoft's standard was Microsoft itself, Microsoft's supply chain, and Microsoft's customers.
As ISO gave its approval controversially in February 2008, the European Commission issued Microsoft with a record €899m fine for abusing its dominant market position by restricting competitors through the use of its ubiquitous software standards.
It seemed absurd to have two standards for one thing. Phipps says it's like having different sorts of railway tracks. Trains designed for tracks of one gauge won't easily travel along tracks of another. David Bell, head of policy at the British Standards Institution, told Computer Weekly last month he knew of no other instances of different standards approved for the same thing.
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By 2010, local authorities with close ties to the team that drafted the government's open standards policy were complaining that Microsoft's hold over document standards was preventing them using competing software. The standards were incompatible, allowing Microsoft to retain possession of the market, charge monopoly rents, and keep innovative competitors at bay.
That was the point of the government's open standards policy: to regulate failed technology markets by removing barriers such as those inherent in proprietary standards like Microsoft's.
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EU market regulators demonstrated just how injudicious ISO's stewardship of standards could be. It is now up to policy makers to set the rules of the game so another Microsoft doesn't create another stifling monopoly as the market moves into the cloud.
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