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
Excrement.
Micro$oftopoly will always piss in the punch bowl, hide hooks in it’s implementation of ‘open’ standards, and provide crippled software to the Macintosh platform.
Exactly Lam, Microsoft has seen the rest of the world moving on without them – and they are terrified by it.
The trouble is, none of this makes Vista any better than the crud it is…
“promote interoperability” — as if MS is leading some global transformation?
MS is following — accommodating, really — and belatedly, and purely for business reasons, and no more than suits their self-interest.
Methinks they are promoting only their own products.
Remember the promises of Open Office XML format? It made word files completely unusable on the mac for months until they released a stinking convertor that worked some of the time.
Microsoft’s increased interoperability: I’ll believe it when I see it.
I meant bi, bye, … buy them some time!
If anyone suffers to read through to the end of the announcement, it’s clear that the impetus for this move was the EU’s recent actions.
Still, my gut tells me that this is also cover for some nefarious action they are about to take, after lulling us into a sense of complacency. I’ll wait to see what knowledgeable competitors have to say about all this before making a judgment. I bet there are some devils lurking in the details…
Ray “Crazy Train from Redmond” Ozzie
“- Microsoft is providing a covenant not to sue open source developers for development or non-commercial distribution of implementations of these protocols. These developers will be able to use the documentation for free to develop products. Companies that engage in commercial distribution of these protocol implementations will be able to obtain a patent license from Microsoft, as will enterprises that obtain these implementations from a distributor that does not have such a patent license.”
If an Open Source developer uses these APIs then to the corporate world that product is now a M$ product. I wonder how this will work under GPL?
Cool. Malware writers will have even more information on how to write malware. I love it!
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In all of that, not one use of MS’s favorite buzzword: “rich.” I mean. is this new transparency going to help deliver rich content to consumers through rich technological expertise delivering a rich multimedia experience, or what…?
No, no, no, they’re not spay painting the chrome-turd gold, they’re saying that you can lick it for free.
MS is to be congratulated on this initiative, particularly as its developers will benefit, and so too will Apple if the formats are more interoperable, etc.
But the prolixity of the verbosity is perplexing: it seems that concise and comprehensible English is the first casualty of U.S. based organizations plus the educators who can’t write a comprehensible textbook. The pronouncement comes across as gobbldygook, but don’t blame MS…it’s the culture.
As long as (em)Ballmer is sitting on the throne, I’ll believe it when I see it.
F1Mikal:–
“what was all that about?
Why can’t people speak clearly anymore?”
I couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, it’s the same old Microsoft. Nothing has changed. Obfuscation is the name of their game, and always will be. They think if you make something so obscure, unclear and unintelligible that no one will understand what you’re talking about, you win. It has nothing to do with reality.
All Hail Verbosity!!
Aren’t computers and the internet about communication?
Isn’t clear communication more powerful?
When you are in the presence of someone who fails to speak clearly, don’t you think WTF did they just say?
Our brains are designed to make sense out of input. One of the powers of Hypnosis is to be vague so the listeners’ minds fill in the blanks. Another is to overload the conscious mind until it gives up.
All Hail Verbosity!!
Aren’t computers and the internet about communication?
Isn’t clear communication more powerful?
When you are in the presence of someone who fails to speak clearly, don’t you think WTF did they just say?
Our brains are designed to make sense out of input. One of the powers of Hypnosis is to be vague so the listeners’ minds fill in the blanks. Another is to overload the conscious mind until it gives up.
All Hail Verbosity!!
Aren’t computers and the internet about communication?
Isn’t clear communication more powerful?
When you are in the presence of someone who fails to speak clearly, don’t you think WTF did they just say?
Our brains are designed to make sense out of input. One of the powers of Hypnosis is to be vague so the listeners’ minds fill in the blanks. Another is to overload the conscious mind until it gives up.
All Hail Verbosity!!
Aren’t computers and the internet about communication?
Isn’t clear communication more powerful?
When you are in the presence of someone who fails to speak clearly, don’t you think WTF did they just say?
Our brains are designed to make sense out of input. One of the powers of Hypnosis is to be vague so the listeners’ minds fill in the blanks. Another is to overload the conscious mind until it gives up.
All Hail Verbosity!!
Aren’t computers and the internet about communication?
Isn’t clear communication more powerful?
When you are in the presence of someone who fails to speak clearly, don’t you think WTF did they just say?
Our brains are designed to make sense out of input. One of the powers of Hypnosis is to be vague so the listeners’ minds fill in the blanks. Another is to overload the conscious mind until it gives up.
All Hail Verbosity!!
Aren’t computers and the internet about communication?
Isn’t clear communication more powerful?
When you are in the presence of someone who fails to speak clearly, don’t you think WTF did they just say?
Our brains are designed to make sense out of input. One of the powers of Hypnosis is to be vague so the listeners’ minds fill in the blanks. Another is to overload the conscious mind until it gives up.
Note that MicroSoft only said they would provide the APIs so developers could have the same interoperability MicroSoft’s “high volume” products enjoy. They said almost nothing about conforming to open standards themselves beyond options to save documents in competing formats. Anyway, beyond their OS and Office, what the hell is MicroSoft high volume product?? Surely they don’t mean the Xbox, mice and keyboards, do they??
Oh and “Expanding industry outreach and dialogue” sure sounds like vain platitudes to me.
Apple: Innovation by design.
Micros**t: Innovation by court order.
This is like a liar telling you he is not lying.
“I don’t get it… Why would they do this?”
Just my take but I think they are beginning to push this whole, “we cannot move away from our crappy software until windows 7, so we will tell you our trade secrets but they all have patents. SO, now your software can run better on MS platforms but you will have to license our patents.
Since we are losing money with Vista, now you can pay us patent money to use our software. And soon we hope to license linux or sue them into the ground and make you pay a patent fee for all this crap that we sell.
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“Microsoft….. All your monies belong to us!!! “
Step 1: Make software do what it is supposed to.
Step 2: Deny that the software does not yet do what it is supposed to.
Step 3: Go back to step 1.