BERKELEY, Calif. (MarketWatch) -- There's a worldwide initiative to push out the de facto standard for the storage of word-processing documents, Microsoft Corp.'s ".doc" file format, and replace it with Open Document Format, a supposedly universal and open format.

This kind of sniping will never end as long as Microsoft is Microsoft MSFT, -1.04% .

Maybe it's time to seriously think of breaking up the company into smaller companies. The individual parts would flourish and benefit the stockholders to an extreme.

In the meantime, the attacks on Microsoft are set to continue the world over.

Some of the rationale is the fear outside the United States that Microsoft already has too much power. There's also the fear, which is discussed less, that Microsoft has been compromised by American spy agencies, and for all anyone knows secret documents saved in Word could be sent to the NSA with the push of a button.

This would be kind of like the zombie bot-networks that use compromised machines to send out spam. The problem is that nobody has ever found any evidence of anything like this.

Microsoft worries less about Asia, since it has allowed rampant piracy of its products to continue unabated. In this case, piracy is a weapon against Linux and open source. But where's the profit in this defensive measure?

I love to tell the story about a speech I gave in Kuala Lumpur. I asked a large audience of techies, "How many of you use Linux?" Something like two out of 500 of them raised their hands. This is abnormally low anywhere in the world.

It turned out that you could buy any Microsoft product or any of its operating systems openly in retail storefronts for a $1 a disc. "Why should we use Linux when Windows is free?" I was told.

This is the equivalent of a holding pattern for a company that has too many balls in the air to deal with Asia properly, with a real strategy.

In Europe, where piracy is controlled, a few too many European countries and municipalities discuss using Linux on the desktop, by fiat.

This is Microsoft's biggest fear. Microsoft can tolerate the Linux server platforms and all the homebrew Web servers running Linux. It just cannot let Linux migrate to the desktop.

So the company obsesses on the possibility that there will be a groundswell of support for Linux and a desire for users to use it as their main OS.

I'd argue that if Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.75% , with its appealing desktop platform and amazing marketing machine cannot unseat Microsoft, then how can the slow-moving open source manage to do it? Is it just because Linux is cheaper?

The perception that Linux is a serious problem is there with Microsoft stuck in the mud, and the stock reflects it. So after you look over the situation and look at the Microsoft share price, you have to wonder if the halcyon days of the stock doubling every year will ever return.

I have always believed that the best thing for Microsoft to do is break itself up into three or maybe four separate companies, and go from there. It has distinct mini-corporations within the structure already.

“ You have to wonder if the halcyon days of the stock doubling every year will ever return. ”

This breakup would benefit the shareholders with diversity, and probably result in the sum of the parts being greater than the whole. In other words, the separate businesses would be worth more overall than what we now have.

As things stand, Microsoft has become stodgy and rumpled. I cannot imagine what would happen to the stock price if the company ever turned in a bad quarter. And that has to happen someday.

I can assure you that when you read about Microsoft in the news, it's a mundane story about the software giant's defensive strategy against one thing or another. It's old. Break up the company while it makes sense.