Microsoft’s press release verbatim:
Microsoft Corp. today announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.
Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products: (1) ensuring open connections; (2) promoting data portability; (3) enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.
“These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies,” said Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer. “For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today’s announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency. Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies.”
According to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, the company’s announcement reflects the significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing. As heterogeneity is the norm within enterprise architectures, interoperability across applications and services has become a key requirement.
“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,” said Ozzie. “By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers.”
“The principles and actions announced today by Microsoft are a very significant expansion of its efforts to promote interoperability,” said Manfred Wangler, vice president, Corporate Research and Technology, Software and Engineering, Siemens. “While Microsoft has made considerable progress on interoperability over the past several years, including working with us on the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, today’s news take Microsoft’s interoperability commitment to a whole new level.”
“The interoperability principles and actions announced today by Microsoft will benefit the broader IT community,” said Thomas Vogel, head, Information Management, Novartis Pharma. “Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products presents significant opportunities for the vast majority of software developers, which will help foster greater interoperability, opportunity and choice in the marketplace. We look forward to a constructive, structured, and multilateral dialogue to ensure stakeholder-driven evolution of these principles and actions.”
The interoperability principles and actions announced today apply to the following high-volume Microsoft products: Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products. Highlights of the specific actions Microsoft is taking to implement its new interoperability principles are described below.
• Ensuring open connections to Microsoft’s high-volume products. To enhance connections with third-party products, Microsoft will publish on its Web site documentation for all application programming interfaces (APIs) and communications protocols in its high-volume products that are used by other Microsoft products. Developers do not need to take a license or pay a royalty or other fee to access this information. Open access to this documentation will ensure that third-party developers can connect to Microsoft’s high-volume products just as Microsoft’s other products do.
– As an immediate next step, starting today Microsoft will openly publish on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret license through the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) and the Microsoft Communication Protocol Program (MCPP). Protocol documentation for additional products, such as Office 2007 and all of the other high-volume products covered by these principles, will be published in the upcoming months.
– Microsoft will indicate on its Web site which protocols are covered by Microsoft patents and will license all of these patents on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, at low royalty rates. To assist those interested in considering a patent license, Microsoft will make available a list of specific Microsoft patents and patent applications that cover each protocol.
– Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.
• Documenting how Microsoft supports industry standards and extensions. To increase transparency and promote interoperability, when Microsoft supports a standard in a high-volume product, it will work with other major implementers of the standard toward achieving robust, consistent and interoperable implementations across a broad range of widely deployed products.
– Microsoft will document for the development community how it supports such standards, including those Microsoft extensions that affect interoperability with other implementations of these standards. This documentation will be published on Microsoft’s Web site and it will be accessible without a license, royalty or other fee. These actions will allow third-party developers implementing standards to understand how a standard is used in a Microsoft product and foster improved interoperability for customers. Microsoft will make available a list of any of its patents that cover any of these extensions, and will make available patent licenses on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
• Enhancing Office 2007 to provide greater flexibility of document formats. To promote user choice among document formats, Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.
• Launching the Open Source Interoperability Initiative. To promote and enable more interoperability between commercial and community-based open source technologies and Microsoft products, this initiative will provide resources, facilities and events, including labs, plug fests, technical content and opportunities for ongoing cooperative development.
• Expanding industry outreach and dialogue. An ongoing dialogue with customers, developers and open source communities will be created through an online Interoperability Forum. In addition, a Document Interoperability Initiative will be launched to address data exchange between widely deployed formats.
The Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council, an advisory organization established in 2006 and consisting mainly of chief information and technology officers from more than 40 companies and government bodies around the world, will help guide Microsoft in its work under these principles and actions. The full text of Microsoft’s new Interoperability Principles, and a full list of the actions Microsoft is taking, can be found on Microsoft’s Interoperability site.
The interoperability principles and actions announced today reflect the changed legal landscape for Microsoft and the IT industry. They are an important step forward for the company in its ongoing efforts to fulfill the responsibilities and obligations outlined in the September 2007 judgment of the European Court of First Instance (CFI).
“As we said immediately after the CFI decision last September, Microsoft is committed to taking all necessary steps to ensure we are in full compliance with European law,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel. “Through the initiatives we are announcing, we are taking responsibility for implementing the principles in the interoperability portion of the CFI decision across all of Microsoft’s high-volume products. We will take additional steps in the coming weeks to address the remaining portion of the CFI decision, and we are committed to providing full information to the European Commission so it can evaluate all of these steps.”
Source: Microsoft Corporation
I think this is a big PR spin of the evil empire attempting to vail its true colors before snatching Yahoo through a hostile takeover. I think perception is even more important that reality, at least as far as commerce goes.
MS is perceived in a very negative light, assimilating Yahoo will only further galvanize this perception. So they come out and with this announcement to help mitigate the negative fallout that the Yahoo acquisition is sure to bestow on to them.
Sorry, I don’t buy it.
HGRKKK! GAH! *cough* *cough*
sorry. there isn’t enough water on the planet to wash down the enormous grain of salt i was trying to take with that announcement…
Good for the EU, they are achieving what the U.S. government never had the guts to do. And it’s not all against MS. They were also successful at having Apple reduce the UK iTunes store prices to be in line with the rest of the continent. Thanks to the EU we are seeing lot of progress against existing monopolies and this is good for competition, innovation and consumers.
P.S. I hope Microsoft also opens up their IM platform.
I stand in awe…
…of the winner if this year’s Turgid Prose Award for Obtuseness and Density in Business Announcements with Coconut Clusters for Disappointment and Irrelevance.
I bet all the producers of Malware will just love all of those new guidebooks.
This is a step in the wrong direction. Using open standards and focusing on interoperability is nonsense. Microsoft makes the whole widget and that’s all you need. Why do they have to play nice with the also-rans?
Vista + Windows Mobile + xBox + Zune. All you need.
Microsoft used to be about choice. Now they say want to lock you into ‘standards’, ‘portability’ and ‘interoperability’. As long as there will remain .DOC, .WMA, & .WMV I’m happy.
Your potential. Our passion.™
“Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.”
So developers can write plugins for Office to allow it to save in other formats, but there is no openness to use other Office-competitors to read/write in Office formats. i.e. their Office formats are still closed.
what was all that about?
Why can’t people speak clearly anymore?
Until they stop pushing for their superfluous OOXML formats to gain ISO certification (that’s what ODF was already ISO certified for back in 2006), and until they show REAL commitment towards making IE 8 100% W3C internet-standards compilant… I’m not buying this.
MW: evidence, as in show me some!
Open connections – it’s what started the malware industry!
Do they really mean IE will start doing good internet from the next version on?
Is that Basic Interoperability, Premium Interoperability, Business Interoperability or Ultimate Interoperability?
MW: types
Okay, so the courts are pounding on them because they are closed. Big deal. The decision of courts never bothered them before, and won’t bother them going forward.
Roll the monkey boy dance video.
The real story here is this implicit concession that developers are more interested in adding value to frameworks where MS would be denied licensing revenue for their bread and butter commercial products. MS can lose their backsides on the consumer side just to be disruptive, but this is a clear statement they have long term concerns about the migration of their developer base.
I call BS on this. It’s a lot of corporate-speak, nay, Microsoft-speak with lots of “good” buzzwords peppered thoughout. When you get rid of the mumbo jumbo, the interoperability and openness of the key products will still be dependent on Microsoft. Good PR, though.
The world is moving away from Microsoft. The company is so scared at the moment that it decided to hop on the runaway train…at least until the opportunity to hit the emergency stop button arises.
if this transparency does not include proprietary technology like ActiveX, the announcement means nothing!
Monoposoft is feeling the winds of change, from within and China.
Europe has given them the finger, and most governments are using linux due to the cost of maintaining windoze, virus, malware, etc…
Google is the new micro$oft, there stuff works, is free or cheap. Apple is the standard the rest try really hard to emulate, but in the end the only emulation is windoze on my MacBook Pro, and im still not sure why i installed it… Oh yeah, the IT idiots at work only support Dell’s and XP.
Im the only one that gets work done around here!
hmmmm….sounds like they are taking a chrome plated turd and trying to spray paint it gold….
Who cares? How is this supposed to change the fact that everything they make is crap? Vista doesn’t suck for any of these reasons-it’s just a sucky product! They still don’t get it. They just don’t get it. Seems to me they’re really just covering their asses here. I don’t see this changing anything-people have begun migrating away from Windows because it’s Windows.
I spoke with a Microsoft representative once about their verbose documentation and said, “I think the rule is ‘never use one word when forty will do.'” She laughed and said it was probably true.
30,000 pages of Microsoft documentation comes down to 1,000 pages of information. They truly think they are responsive. The problem with being verbose is that you eventually cannot understand your own documents.
So this is the beginning of the end.
IBM responded verbosely to the government when it was in trouble for monopolistic practices. The IBM of today is the Microsoft of tomorrow.
Call me a skeptic but there’s gotta be something in this for Microsoft too or they wouldn’t be doing it. After all, if this gets more people thinking “Hey, maybe Microsoft’s not so much Big Brother-ish after all” then less people will change their minds and decide to switch to FOSS or OS X. However, if this ends up making it so that IE conforms better to W3C code and doesn’t require so much extraneous coding, web developers will certainly rejoice. If this make it so that DirectX is more easily made cross-platform or Microsoft starts supporting OpenGL, which many consider to be a better technology, then hopefully gaming on the Mac will benefit. Not that any of us have time to play games, right? If this isn’t more of the same bullshit on a different day, it’s a good announcement. Otherwise I’ve got some to say to mister Ballmer, “Go experiment with the interoperability of two thumbs and my boot up the openness of your ass.”
That’s a really long press release for a whole lot of nothing.
This just means, with the proposed purchase of Yahoo, Microsoft will no longer have money to throw away in fines at European regulatory agencies. It will also by them some time and goodwill to address government agencies and businesses defecting to Linux.
The real question is how long before this is implemented and whether they will update their APIs on a regularly.
I call shenanigans…
Yeah but where are they going to find the talent to pull this off??
I wonder which we will see first, true interoperability or the big ass table?
That Ozzie guy is behind this. There is actually a strategy here. I hope they don’t start listening to him very often.
Has MS truly decided to play with everyone else? Are they no longer intent on crushing the competition? We will see.