Every Microsoft product has a free, open-source counterpart created by dedicated programmers who loathe everything the company stands for. The free stuff is darn good. Yet companies and individuals continue to buy billions of dollars worth of Microsoft products.

To be fair, Microsoft software is sometimes better than the competition’s. But quality isn’t the only factor: The company has spent years digging moats around its castle, building digital walls to keep other vendors out and users in. One of the biggest factors is its control over proprietary data formats.

Most folks see data formats as an inside-baseball issue, because they work in all-Microsoft organizations where incompatibilities are rare. The only hangup, in that case, comes when Microsoft releases new software (Office 2007 being the latest example). Invariably, the data format’s been upgraded as well.

The new software reads your old files, but your old software can’t read the new files. There are workarounds, but the only sensible thing is for an organization to upgrade all at once. And an organization can’t wait too long to upgrade if it has to share files with other entities that have upgraded.

As for competitive software, it fares even worse, because Microsoft doesn’t release the details of its proprietary data formats to the developers of programs like Open Office. If the developers want their wares to read Microsoft files, they have to reverse-engineer the format.

This works to varying degrees. Simple word processing documents translate pretty well. Complex spreadsheets, with macros and formulas, may not translate at all or contain errors that aren’t obvious. About the time the competition has figured out all the ins and outs of translation, surprise, it’s time for another format upgrade.

As with upgrading, organizational prudence requires sticking with Microsoft rather than Brand X to stay compatible with older files and with the rest of the world. Managers may grouse about costs, but they’re not about to stake the fate of a Fortune 500 corporation on non-Microsoftware, regardless of price or features.

The data format wars have been going on for years and have provoked a substantial backlash. The anti-Microsoft crowd has an alternate data format, Open Document, that anyone can freely incorporate into any program, just as everyone uses the same old free, nonproprietary HTML to build Web sites. Not only that, but they’ve managed to persuade a fair number of governments to legislate standards requiring word processors, spreadsheets and such to include open document standards as well as proprietary ones.

So why doesn’t Microsoft want to add another data format? Why force Microsoft to incorporate an open document standard into its software? I mean, there’s no reason Word, for example, couldn’t support both an open and a proprietary format.

If enough countries and organizations opt for Open Document (the People’s Republic of Massachusetts, for example, is a big fan) a couple of years down the road you’ve squeezed out Microsoft’s proprietary formats and Office is an option rather than a necessity. You can shop around for the best deal on software and services.

There’s certainly an element of economic nationalism at work here - abroad, why export dollars to the United States for Microsoft products when there’s a huge base of free software? And domestically, the motives of the Open Document crowd aren’t entirely pure either - some of the big players, like IBM, Sun and Google, have business models that look to sales of hardware, services or advertising, as opposed to proprietary office software.

Which brings us to the current state of controversy. To fend off the Open Document movement, Microsoft came up with its own ‘‘open’’ standard: Office Open XML, designed to meet the various mandates shaping up around the world. To become a standard, it had to clear several hurdles. Early this year first it lost, then it won the key vote in international trade groups. This month a number of members, including India and Brazil, have filed protests that could take a couple of months to resolve. In the meantime, the European Union has opened one investigation into Open XML and anti-competitive practices in British schools and is being urged toward a more general probe.

Is Open XML an open standard? The arguments are pretty technical but boil down to this: Microsoft says Open Document is not good and that anyone will be able to implement its far more enlightened Open Office XML. Opponents say Microsoft has built into Open XML all manner of snares, deadfalls and booby traps to defend its monopoly.

So how does this all affect the average computer user? Some kind of improved compatibility among different software vendors is in the near future, whether it’s Microsoft’s vision or the more open Open Document. In the office, the decision to switch to a new suite of programs is out of your hands. At home it’s worth taking a shot, particularly if you don’t need to operate with some big organization that uses Office. If open source works for you, why waste your money?

For day-to-day writing, I’ve been using Open Office for a while and haven’t ever missed Microsoft Office. I save my documents in an older format of Word that my editor can read just fine. I also use Google Docs and Spreadsheets when I need to share information over the Internet with my wife. And I’m auditioning the latest open source goodie, IBM Lotus Symphony, which looks like a sweet suite. More on that next time.

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Correction and amplification: My apologies to Verizon. I’ve been using its cell phone Backup Assistant program for so long that I forgot I’m no longer paying for it. While the official price is $2 per month, it is free if you register at its Web site.

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