Microsoft exec talks patent politics

...it's backwardly compatible with Office binary file formats. [Using ODF], you're then saying to all of our users: "Well, tough — if you want to move to XML, you're going to lose some of what you had in the binary file format."

For years people have been asking us to open up the Microsoft Office file formats and submit them to a standards body; [it's] strange that, now we've done it, there seem to be some people jumping up and down, saying: "How dare you do that!" You think: "What do you want us to do? Not standardise them?"

But there are some people, for example the ODF Alliance, who are saying that Microsoft is again attempting to lock people into a standard — that Open XML has not been developed in the interests of interoperability, that it's a means for Microsoft to lock people into one particular standard that is Microsoft compatible.
Well Novell's version of OpenOffice is compatible with Open XML, and Corel.

Yes, but Microsoft has signed a licensing deal with Novell.
I could see the argument if we hadn't submitted [Open XML] to a standards body, because then you could say Microsoft could be trying to dominate the XML document file format market just by the sheer ubiquity of Office as a product. Actually, we've done the opposite. Now anyone can go away and build an office product that implements Open XML. We no longer have control over it; it's no longer ours.

I do find it an interesting comment, because it seems slightly contradictory to me. There are some people saying: "Only ODF should be allowed as a standard", which effectively precludes any other open document file formats, including Open XML.

By "some people" do you mean IBM?
IBM seems to be pushing hard [on standards bodies], which seems to be a pure commercial play, because their products have been built to support ODF not Open XML.

But, by the same token, you could say Microsoft's is a pure commercial play, because its products have been built to support Open XML and not ODF.
Except you can plug in an ODF converter [in Microsoft Office] in the same way you can plug in a PDF converter, and what will be a URF converter for what will be the Chinese government XML standard. When we tried to put PDF as a core into the product, you may remember Adobe were a little uneasy, so we made it a plug-in.

For years people have been asking us to open up the Microsoft Office file formats and submit them to a standards body. Now we've done it, some people are saying: 'How dare you do that!'

Jerry Fishenden, Microsoft UK

In response to parliamentary pressure, the government recently admitted that, over the past five years, it has overspent on IT projects by £1bn. What is your thinking about government IT overspend — is it inevitable?
In the context of £14.2bn annual government spend on IT, which is approximately £70bn over the past five years, £1bn is one and a bit percent. The global overspend figure is often caused by changing requirements as a project is in progress. It may actually be incremental cost due to evolving requirements.

It's more sensible to change your mind and modify the requirement as you go along, if you realise the original ones are wrong, than to wilfully carry on and build the wrong thing just because that's what the original procurement set out to do.

However, potentially, if you deliver a duff IT project, there's no-one who can say: "You should not work on any more projects."

This is linked to the professionalism in IT agenda. If you look at what you regard as the traditional professions — doctors, teachers, lawyers — their professional bodies can fire people, can investigate complaints, can impose penalties, and the ultimate sanction is to remove them from the profession, so [they] can't practice any more.

When you look at the IT industry, talking about professionalism, you have to say that we're not at that stage yet. If we're serious about being a profession and we mean to get to that level that doctors, lawyers and others have got to, then, as an industry, we need to find a better way.

There are so many different professional bodies it would obviously be good, if we want to be respected as a profession, for there to be some method of ensuring the industry as a whole maintains those professional standards, because otherwise...