Angus Kidman22 February 2008, 9:16 AM
Microsoft is promising a new world of interoperability with its software, with support for industry standards and open file formats. Have these two men turned a new leaf?
Microsoft's newfound enthusiasm for interoperability adds up to largely hot air and a poorly-concealed upgrade pitch, and as such doesn't represent any sort of victory for the open source community.
In what it is being promoted as a "strategic plan", Microsoft has announced that it is now committed to four main "interoperability principles": ensuring "open connections", promoting data portability, enhancing support for industry standards, and working more with the open source community and other customers.
 Interoperable: Would you buy a used interoperability principle from these men? Photo not retouched. |
An ideal translation of this would be: we're really sorry our file formats and APIs are so impenentrable and that we've foisted so many weird "commercial standards" on the world, so here you go, have some source code. The reality is nowhere near as appealing.
For starters, this only applies to "high volume business products" -- so no commitment to opening up Zune's DRM format, for instance. It also only covers the latest and future generation of products: Vista; Office, SharePoint and Exchange Server 2007; Windows Server and SQL Server 2008; and the .NET Framework.
It seems that openness comes at a high price - upgrading everything in your enterprise. Far more companies would benefit if the commitment was even mildly retrospective. And it is perhaps typical that Microsoft makes a business-only move precisely when most analysts are saying consumer technology is influencing the enterprise, rather than the reverse.
One of the more revealing sentences in the announcement concedes that "heterogeneity is the norm in enterprise architectures", which is a major concession from a company whose core marketing tactic has long been the notion that Windows products should work well together because, well, it's all Windows.
"Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions,” chief software architect Ray Ozzie proclaimed. Microsoft has long pushed an image as the developer's friend, so this tacit acknowledgement that its products can be a hostile environment is interesting, to say the least.
Its most interesting developer commitment is to document all APIs that different Microsoft products use when interoperating with other MS software, thus eliminating the perceived internal advantage of having access to undocumented routines. It has also undertaken not to sue developers who build open-source products to work with those APIs, and to licence any patent-associated technologies at low rates. Office 2007 users can also replace the existing default formats with any others they choose via a new (and so far unseen) set of APIs.
Conspiracy theorists might argue that Microsoft's actions are a defensive move against the growing popularity of open source products such as Linux and OpenOffice, or a sop to prevent further legal challenges in Europe. The fact that such an announcement has come when founder Bill Gates is almost out the door might also be deemed significant.
However, the devil of such "strategic plans" is in the details, which remain thin on the ground right now. Instead, we get jargon-ridden quotes like this gem: "We look forward to a constructive, structured, and multilateral dialogue to ensure stakeholder-driven evolution of these principles and actions." (APC really did not make any part of that sentence up.)
In truth, if Microsoft was really scared of the open source wolf, there'd be a lot of older source code on the table. The current plan sounds superficially impressive, but until the full documentation for products such as Office appears -- said to be "in the upcoming months" -- it's clear that hot air predominates.