About Becta

In October 2007 Becta complained to the UK competition regulator – the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) - alleging:

• anti-competitive licensing practices by Microsoft in the schools software marketplace 
• the existence of impediments to effective interoperability in relation to Microsoft's Office 2007 product.

In January 2008 the European Commission announced that it was initiating a formal investigation in relation to Microsoft's approach to interoperability across a number of areas, including:  

" .. whether Microsoft's new file format Office Open XML, as implemented in MS Office, is sufficiently interoperable with competitors' products." 

Following discussions with the OFT, Becta has now referred its interoperability complaint and related evidence to the European Commission in support of the Commission's wider investigation. At a recent meeting with the Commission Becta set out its key areas of concern and their impact on the UK education system.

Becta believes that impediments to interoperability limit choice. In the context of the education system this can result in higher prices and a range of other unsatisfactory effects which have a negative impact on wider policy initiatives, including improving educational outcomes, facilitating home school links and addressing the digital divide.

Commenting after the recent meeting with the Commission to discuss Becta’s detailed concerns, Dr Stephen Lucey, Becta's Executive Director of Strategic Technologies, said:

"It is not just the interests of competitors and the wider marketplace that are damaged when barriers to effective interoperability are created. Such barriers can also damage the interests of education and training organisations, learners, teachers and parents.

I therefore very much welcome the decision by the Commission to conduct a wide ranging investigation."

Indicating the rationale for the decision to complain to the regulators Dr Lucey stated:

"Intervention via the competition authorities is not our preferred approach. Ideally we prefer to address interoperability issues by working in close partnership with the wider industry. We are successfully addressing a range of other interoperability challenges through this type of approach."

Dr Lucey confirmed that the other aspect of Becta's complaint, which relates to Microsoft's School Agreement licensing model, remains under active consideration by the OFT.

Notes for editors

The original October 2007 complaint to the OFT argued, in respect of Microsoft's Office 2007 product, that interoperability difficulties for non technical users would be compounded by Microsoft's decision to offer native "out of the box" support for its own OOXML format, yet to refuse to offer equivalent support for the ISO approved Open Document Format (ODF) increasingly used by Microsoft’s competitors. 

This decision had the effect of requiring users to download and install a range of converters to enable them to interoperate with those competitor products. Becta argued that such circumstances would constitute a barrier to the uptake and use of competitor products and limit competition and choice for educational users.

Becta's complaint also argued that, even if the user succeeded in installing the ODF converters necessary to facilitate interoperability with competitor products, the resulting solution would nevertheless represent an unsatisfactory outcome for users and would act as a further barrier to competition and choice. This position is driven by the fact that there is limited functionality available via the converters, and that they are poorly integrated into the overall Microsoft user interface, as compared with for example the integration and functionality Microsoft offers for its own OOXML format.

Becta had also called on the UK regulator to conduct a review of the barriers to the use of other application software in, or interfacing with, the Windows environment to determine if there are barriers to competition and choice which go beyond those which Becta has identified and, if so, to introduce remedies to address them.

Becta has recently commented in relation to the approval of the OOXML format as an ISO standard. Pending the outcome of the Commission's investigation, and the response of the wider marketplace to that decision, our advice to education and training organisations in relation to the use of Office 2007 and the OOXML file format remains as set out in our publication Microsoft Vista and Office 2007: full report.