Gauging the impact of the Office 14 delay

Are the Internet and standards making Microsoft slower?

Analyst Carmi Levy believes that Microsoft could be suffering from a evolutionary roadblock: namely, the inability to embrace the Internet-driven model of development, even when the future of its product depends on SharePoint and Internet-based functionality.

As Levy told Betanews, "Microsoft's big bang approach to product development seems positively clumsy compared to rapid feature evolution evident in online productivity applications. In the Internet Age, Google's releasing of rapid-fire, incremental updates to Google Apps, for example, is a far more viable product improvement strategy than years-long internal development projects capped off by massively marketed release events. The Office 14 delay is likely a quiet admission by Microsoft that big bang strategies no longer work, and the ultimate product will mesh the best of traditional and Web-based apps. That doesn't happen without a serious rethink of what's under the hood, hence the time shift."

Inevitably, suspicion will probably be pointed toward Microsoft's pledge to support new document standards, including its one-time rival ODF, in Office 14. The delay means that Microsoft can't exactly say its applications are designed around standards, for at least another year.

That's probably not the hitch, though, at least from Directions on Microsoft's Rob Helm's perspective. He believes Microsoft has been gradually backing off of its standards support pledge, specifically through the release last December of so-called "Implementation Notes" that explain the reasons behind various standards implementation choices the company made or may yet make. The existence of those notes, he implies, enables Microsoft to choose its own paths on a per-case basis, and let third parties sort out the differences.

Helm pointed us to a prepared Q&A with Senior Program Manager Doug Mahugh, published last December, in which he explained why Microsoft makes design choices at all: "The reality is that every implementer makes choices when it comes down to actually developing a solution based on a standard," Mahugh said at the time. "There are several reasons why an implementation may differ from a standard. For instance, a standard may be ambiguous and not address how to accomplish certain goals, or the standard may allow for a wider range of behavior than a particular implementation can support. In another example, an application may need to address customer requirements not anticipated by a standard. Having a published standard is only the starting point. Helping others understand how standards are implemented practically to address customers' changing needs is very important to driving toward real-world interoperability."

Statements like that led Helm to conclude, he told us, that "Microsoft hasn't committed to supporting the entire ISO 29500 in Office 14; all it has said is that the standard won't be supported in Office 2007 SP2, and that Office 14 will 'update' that support. In fact, in the announcement of its Implementation Notes program, Microsoft has telegraphed that it isn't necessarily going to strictly implement any document standards, [though] the company does promise to document its implementations."

But Carmi Levy feels that the Office 14 delay could be an indicator of a demon that has come back to bite Microsoft when it can afford it least.

"Microsoft has spent much of the past 15 years trying to enforce its document standard vision on the broader market. The company is now paying the price, in increased complexity, of having to support the resulting numbers of different standards that emerged as a result," stated Levy. "Outside of Adobe, few players in the content management game seem to be willing to take a leadership position in terms of deciding what file formats we all use. [Microsoft's] efforts would be better invested in driving out fewer, more universal standards, as an open standards-based world allows development resources to be redirected toward more value-added areas. Developers would be able to spend more time developing better, more integrated features, and the end product would be easier to support. The file format 'Tower of Babel' needs to end, and soon."