When I grumbled in the Technobile slot recently about the bad behaviour of Microsoft’s beta converter for the Macintosh (to take documents saved in the new .docx format and convert them to RTFs), I had no idea of the vast hinterland of acrimony out there surrounding Office 2007.
The most interesting was the discovery that the two leading science journals, Nature and Science, are discouraging scientists from submitting papers in the Word 2007 format. Science magazine notes that: “Equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 – for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us – was not designed to be compatible with MathML.”
This prompted a lot of discussion on the Technology blog earlier this week on the question of quite where the fault lies. Is it in the publishers not rushing to embrace the new format and encouraging scientists to make the expensive upgrade too? Or the publishers (again) in not getting scientists to use free software such as LaTex and OpenOffice?
What’s clear is that Microsoft isn’t going to give up trying to impose its new formats on the world. It’s built into its DNA, and indeed pretty much every software organisation’s DNA: what you had before just doesn’t cut it. Here, try this new shinier one. By the way, none of your friends on the old stuff will be able to use it — but that’s OK, you can persuade them to upgrade, can’t you?
But the game has changed since Microsoft could assume that every new version of Office would automatically be snapped up by existing customers. I’ve never seen figures for the rates (or ratio) of upgrades from one version of Office to another. I’d assume it follows a pattern like infection in a population: as long as few people are “infected” with the new version, there’s a sort of herd immunity against it (or its use); but as the new version spreads, more and more people acquire it until a tipping point is reached, leading to an outbreak of upgrading. Eventually, only a rump of “immune” – non-upgraded – users is left. With Office 2007, we’re definitely in the early infection stage.
This time feels different,though, because of the explosion in applications built around the older format. Dozens of products use .doc as their basis. Office 2007 wants to tear them up. But it’s now trying to pull the 10-tonne truck of existing applications, documents, workflows and users with its teeth. We wouldn’t tolerate it on web pages now, although when Netscape and Microsoft were vying for dominance in the browser wars of the mid 1990s, it was common to find that pages wouldn’t work in one browser or the other. Microsoft won that by using its Windows leverage to force Explorer on people. But when the corporation dusted off the code for IE, it found that the web had moved on, and IE had to adapt.
Science and Nature will probably upgrade some time in the next few years. But I suspect that the rump of non-users of Office 2007 will remain large as the web becomes an increasingly important repository for our files.
Maybe Microsoft will need to introduce a few mutations into its DNA to cope. That’s evolution in action. The alternative, of course, being extinction.
The Guardian