[Fsfe-uk] Trying to pull a fast one in the Office

[Paul Mobbs]

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http://observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,1071002,00.html

The Networker:

"Trying to pull a fast one in the Office"

John Naughton, The Observer, Sunday October 26, 2003


Here we go again. According to the New York Times, Microsoft is planning to 
spend between $150 million and $200m marketing Office 2003, the latest 
version of its suite of word-processing, spreadsheet and presentation 
software.

Nothing new in that, you may say: after all, Microsoft sits on a cash mountain 
$40 billion high, so what's a few hundred million here or there? Ah, but the 
marketing spend on this particular upgrade is five times what the company 
spent on its previous upgrade, Office XP. Since not even Microsoft throws 
money away, we may legitimately ask: what's up? Could it be that the boys at 
Redmond are beginning to worry about, er, competition?

I think they are. But it's not the threat from the wonderful (and free) 
OpenOffice software that's bothering them at the moment. That threat is still 
in the incubation stage. The real competition for Office 2003 comes from 
previous versions of Microsoft Office. After all, if you're a large 
organisation that is getting on perfectly well with say, Office 98 or Office 
2000, why would you want to spend several hundred thousand pounds upgrading 
to Office 2003 - especially when you find that it won't run on versions of 
Windows earlier than XP (or Windows 2000 with Service pack 3 installed)?

This argument for not upgrading is compounded by the fact that Microsoft 
bloatware often requires throwing away your old hardware and buying new kit 
as well as paying for software licences.

In other words, Microsoft's past success in dominating the market for office 
software threatens its future revenues from that source. Bill Gates's dream 
of 'a computer on every desk and every computer running Microsoft software' 
becomes a nightmare of every computer running old Microsoft software.

So what to do? The answer is the oldest trick in the snake oil sales manual: 
prey on your users' insecurities. Every document you create with Microsoft 
Office software carries concealed within it information about its provenance 
and history. If you know how to access this information, you can see who 
authored the document, who revised or commented upon it (and when) and so on.

(This feature played a minor role in the Iraq 'dossier' story. Downing Street 
published a Microsoft Word document on its website without realising that its 
revision history could be accessed. That history was duly accessed by an 
enterprising, tech-savvy journalist, who then looked up the revising civil 
servants in a Whitehall directory and - Bingo! It became clear who had been 
involved.)

The new version of Office includes a new feature called 'information rights 
management', designed to fix this. IRM essentially makes it possible for the 
originator of a document to control who has access to it and under what 
circumstances, no matter how widely the file is distributed. This is being 
touted as a major new 'security' feature, and for control freaks in 
government, law firms and corporations it will doubtless be a boon.

But it also has the side-effect of making it very difficult for organisations 
to run a 'mixed economy' of Office software, because the folks with older 
versions will not be able to access IRM-protected documents.

The covert strategy implicit in all this is that in the end companies will 
concede defeat and standardise on the new version. You would have to be 
exceedingly stupid to fall for it.


address@hidden

Briefhistory.com/footnotes




==========

"We are not for names, nor men, nor titles of Government, nor are we for
this party nor against the other but we are for justice and mercy and
truth and peace and true freedom, that these may be exalted in our nation,
and that goodness, righteousness, meekness, temperance, peace and unity
with God, and with one another, that these things may abound."
(Edward Burroughs, 1659 - from 'Quaker Faith and Practice')


Paul Mobbs, Mobbs' Environmental Investigations,
3 Grosvenor Road, Banbury OX16 5HN, England
tel./fax (+44/0)1295 261864

email - address@hidden
website - http://www.fraw.org.uk/mobbsey.html
public key - http://www.fraw.org.uk/keylist.html



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