Ethan Marcotte now blogs at Unstoppable Robot Ninja.

Weblog entry:

One Office to rule ‘em all.

The new rights management tools splinter to some extent the long-standing interoperability of Office formats. Until now, PC users have been able to count on opening and manipulating any document saved in Microsoft Word’s ".doc" format or Excel’s ".xls" in any compatible program, including older versions of Office and competing packages such as Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice and the open-source OpenOffice. But rights-protected documents created in Office 2003 can be manipulated only in Office 2003.

CNET News.com: New Office locks down documents

From where I stand in my little anti-Microsoft island o’ fun, it would seem that very few will benefit from Microsoft’s Information Rights Management (or IRM), which is integrated into every nook of Office 2003. I guess what strikes me as most problematic is what this means for those of us currently trying to move beyond Redmond’s OS — or more importantly, those of us who might want to at some point in the future. For example, if competing office suites such as OpenOffice were to manage to open a document initially created in Office 2003, wouldn’t they be in violation of the DMCA for violating an anti-circumvention mechanism?

I really don’t know enough about internet law to know for sure. What I do know is that the only reason that my attempts to move to Linux have been even remotely practical has been because of the promise of interoperability: that I’d be able to work with files created by Windows users on Windows applications. Now, that promise has been stamped with an expiration date — once Office 2003 becomes the de facto productivity software, Microsoft will have succeeded in not only raising the gates higher around its proprietary file formats, but in divesting consumers of their ability to choose the best product among a suite of competitors.

Joy.

Update: ACM Queue has published an exhaustive analysis of Microsoft Office/Linux interoperability.

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