Ralph Nader recently sent a high-profile letter to a government agency proposing a number of possible solutions to the Microsoft monopoly, some involving a boycot of Microsoft products by the government. ZDNet editor Dan Farber wrote an editorial on his opinion of Nader's proposals. I'd like to narrow the domain of the topic a little, and talk about something which has been bothering me, as a government contractor, for a number of years.

Ralph does have a point with respect to the US govornment's use of Microsoft Office. The US Govornment definately should add other operating systems to the approved purchase list; if they don't, they're explicitly supporting the monopoly. However, as much as this indirectly affects the economy by funneling funds to Microsoft, it doesn't directly affect the rest of the US economy.

MS Office is a different, more serious, matter. The govornment's choice of document format sets the standard for the rest of the economy. The choice of document format defines how private companies communicate with the govornment, and this has wide reprocussions in the public sector. To communicate with the govornment -- that is, to share documents -- you must /currently/ submit documents in Office formats (Excell, MS Word, Power Point, etc). Businesses that don't follow this rule end up not doing very much business with govornment agencies. As a result, many businesses outside of the govornment that do business with the govornment are effectively locked into purchasing Microsoft products. There is a trickle-down effect here: third degree companies, which may have nothing to do directly with the govornment but which do business with govornment contractors, then find that they too must purchase Office to communicate with the contractors. In this way, the govornment's choice of standards often the standards for the rest of the country, and much of the world. In this way, the govornment's choice of software encourages monopoly.

It goes further: when the govornment makes govornment documents (rules, regulations, IRS tax forms, etc) available only in MS Word format, they're, again, forcing private citizens to purchase MS Word.

The solution is extremely simple. Historically, the government has chosen a software suite, and then made that software suite's document format the standard for government use. This must change. The government must lead, not follow, with a set of open standards document formats. These formats must be controlled by no single software provider, and the government should provide a free set of conformity unit tests. Don't worry about the complexity of the test suite; they would be for software developers, who should know about these things, not end users. However, no application that produces documents that do not pass these test suites should be allowed in the internal government "approved purchase" list. Companies which want the government to purchase their software are then forced to support the document format(s), and /all/ companies have equal opportunity to produce conforming software. The document format is public, exposed, and no one company has an inside edge. Then the government can choose from a variety of software providers, and the government's participation in the monopoly is stopped. The point here is that this isn't a solution based on hurting Microsoft -- it is a solution designed to level the playing field. Microsoft would have just as much chance as anyone of selling their software to the government -- but not more.

There are several very good open source document formats, so this isn't a very costly solution. There is an argument to be made about whether the government is the right organization to be producing document format specifications; probably not, but there /are/ numerous standards bodies that can be approached to produce and maintain these specifications.

The required document formats would be word processing, desktop publishing, presentation, and spreadsheet. While they're at it, the government should also require that any web page production software they're purchasing be standards compliant, producing HTML with no company-specific extensions.

Note that this won't solve the problem of Microsoft-as-Monopoly; it would just end the US government's participation in supporting that monopoly.

A former client, and government employee, mentioned in response to this that the government does have a series of SGML document standards, but that they are not widely enforced or in use, and that the de-facto standard is indeed Microsoft Word.

SGML is a sore spot with me; SGML is extremely complex. XML, however, is not, and is a valid subset of SGML. Any XML standard would, therefore, also satisfy the SGML standard. An internal policy of enforcing the standards by not allowing software on the "approved purchase list" that didn't support the standard would, of course, be required for any such policy to have any effect.