The ability for people to share information cross platform and even cross application is extremely important.  Not only does this prevent one company from controlling the entire market share of document file formats but it also encourages interoperability and easy of transition between different environments.  Today it would seem that  the most popular file format for text documents is one that Microsoft set.  This ‘.doc’  extension that we have become accustomed to is constantly being revised with every release of Microsoft Word.  For example, new Word Documents with the extension ‘*.docx’ are incompatible with older versions of Microsoft Word.

A vote was held between many competing file formats for an open standard.  An open standards format would mean that a globally agreed upon file format was chosen and companies/people would create products that abide by the ‘rules’ of the open standard.  In this way people could edit the same document over any platform and expect the resulting work to consistent if the file had been edited using another program.  This is currently not true with Microsoft Word files edited with free software such as Abiword and OpenOffice.  While Abiword and OpenOffice both offer some levels of backwards compatibility with Microsoft Word, the exact document specifics such as word placement, margins, spacing are not exactly consistent.  This can create huge headaches for users operating on different systems.

In my example, Microsoft is the large Cluster in the network of file formats.  The competing standard that was recently trying (but eventually failed) to win the vote was called OpenDocument Format (ODF).  This technology is currently used by free software and companies that oppose Microsoft’s standard such as IBM.  Microsoft’s technology is called Office Open XML (OOXML).  While many people were beginning to use OpenDocument, the spread of the cascade hit a cluster (Microsoft) and was not able to overcome it.  Microsoft with its vast resources was able to win the vote, therefore OOXML is now International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certified as a standard.

This situation can also be modeled as a cloud of nodes in a large interconnected network.  The nodes are individuals who use a certain file format.  The links between the nodes are of individuals who communicate with each other.  Therefore, if two nodes are connected, it is highly favorable to use the same technology and file format.  The initial state of the nodes are all using Technology A (Microsoft Word).  From the inside of the cloud of nodes, several initial nodes start to adopt Technology B (ODF).  The small amount of nodes (compared to the super cluster) is unable to persuade the rest of the nodes (outside their inner circle) to use ODF and therefore the cascade stops.  Since the rest of the nodes are all using Technology A, they have no incentives to switch to ODF, doing so would make it harder to communicate with neighboring nodes and result in a negative payoff.

Ironically, recent tests have shown that Microsoft Word failed to meet the standards set in OOXML however they will be corrected soon.