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
And this means that MS will provide meaningful exchange support to something other than outlook when?
Hmmm, let’s see, which to buy… Windows Server with all kinds of stuff that they *cough* promise to open up, or Leopard Server with all kinds of stuff that is OPEN RIGHT NOW…
Now you know why my company is buying an Xserve.
Don’t you guys get it?
This is one of the things Yahoo! demanded of MS before they would sell. They said they don’t like MS because it’s too closed and proprietary, while Yahoo!, being an internet company, is moving more and more towards platform agnosticism.
It’s a value issue. Yahoo! says, “no you’re too closed and platform dependent for us, that goes against our values” and MS says, “Oh yeah? Wait, watch this… Now let us devour you!”
I wouldn’t be surprised if Yahoo! sells to them in the near future, and don’t think these two events aren’t connected.
Hillary, Obama, and Micro$oft, and Zune Tang. Talk is cheap!
What if instead Micro$oft came out with some proprietary hardware and software products that revolutionized the industry? Sounds easier. Don’t hold your breath along with that grain of salt.
I think what is happening is that MSFT sees that the only way to maintain control is to keep people locked into their products. They just lost the HD DVD contest, yet another failed effort to keep their preferred media formats as a standard. They also failed in the audio arena, where WMA is becoming increasingly marginalized.
The Europeans are not buying their version for Office document standards, and given all that, I think MSFT has decided they have one option left:
Act quickly while they still have a majority control in remaining markets which still use their codecs and standards.
They would be laughed out of just about anywhere if they seriously tried to put forth WMA as the standard that the world should settle around for audio content. It’s too late for that format to be salvaged.
But that is not true with, with .doc. etc.
They still have enough clout to try to make some of their standards “the standard.”
How?
Buy opening things up and letting plugins etc. to be built for their products, which will hopefully maintain or increase their share of the preferred format of a market or field.
If they can get enough people—users, developers, gov’t agencies to fully and wholly tie into their products, then the majority of the market will have become backers of MSFT standards, and will have created defacto standards, based on ubiquity.
If they can pull this off, not only MSFT, but these other entities, newly vested in MSFT products and formats will be more inclined to go to standards bodies and say, leave this alone, we’ve already settled on the standard for this field and we all agree that the MSFT product, codec, format, et al is the already established standard, and we’re OK with that.
I think it is a smart move, but it also shows how worried, and I mean deep down in your soul worried, MSFT really is.
Seeing MSFT, that scared is really kinda heartwarming, in a Wes Cravenish kinda way.
Shouldn’t that have read:
Microsoft’s big news: more broken promises to expand interoperability, increase openness of key products (by making them more exact copies of other OS’s)
Actions speak louder than words.
@HolyMackarel
“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.”
I believe Microsoft published their office binary
file format and that information is located in the
following link:
http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2008/02/15/binary-documentation-doc-xls-ppt-and-translator-project-site-are-now-live.aspx
I haven’t looked at it yet, but it looks like Microsoft is finally heading into the right direction. Many thanks to the European Union threatening Microsoft.
Listen to what they mean…not what they say.
They never do what they say.
More like:
MIcrosoft promises to expand inoperability.
Interoperability? So that’s why they released Mac Office 2008 without Visual Basic so that all the Mac users couldn’t use the macros in the Excel spreadsheets sent to them by their Office 2007 buddies!!!!
Wow! I had been holding my breath waiting for “a constructive, structured, and multilateral dialogue to ensure stakeholder-driven evolution of these principles and actions.”
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080221/microsoft-reacts/
MW: many – as in, broken promises previously made by Microsoft along these same lines.
If Microsoft is so dedicated to openness and interoperability, why is the default Word format in Office 2008 for Mac (.docx) incompatible with all previous versions of Word? Could Microsoft possibly have done anything dumber or more user-unfriendly???
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/02/smoke-and-mirro.html
Wow it’s slow news day today
thats not news, especially coming from microsoft, unless we can be guarenteed they can pull it off
Oh, b*llSh*t. This is the same company that wanted to sue the open source community for patent infringement (as if linux users would touch anything with Microsoft’s name on it, since they hate Microsoft just as much as Mac users).
This is some kind of a scheme to kill/control Open source. Windows has grown as large as it’s going to get. The only way for MS to continue to grow is to either get people to stop pirating windows (not going to happen) or get that ten percent who doesn’t use windows to use it.
Mac users aren’t going to be using windows even with the switch to intel. Linux/BSD/whatever users hate everything MS stands for. Microsoft’s business model is such that they consider it mission accomplished only if all their competitor’s have been destroyed. Recently Windows has stopped being the center of the world (if it ever was to begin with). More and more people are switching to other operating systems like OS X, or relaying on software that isn’t in any way associated with Microsoft. More and more people are buying computers just to connect to the internet, and Microsoft has serious competitors it can’t defeat in that arena (google among others). Microsoft has tried expanding it’s business into other areas, but failed (see the zune, and not being able to get a substantial profit on the Xbox 360). So, MS needs to either kill one of it’s competitors or find a way to control them (get them to be dependent on their code). Hence this move.
Wouldn’t it be funny if no one downloaded their API’s?
I won’t
Bullshit! Utter Bullshit!
Why the hell would one need to license a protocol that one is using to let one’s own software interoperate with someone else’s?
Even if there was a shred of truth to any of that rhetoric, it’s too little too late. (smirks smugly)
Microsoft just locked up the award for the Best SciFi of 2008!
Apple makes big announces about products and services consumers actually care about. Microsoft makes its big announcement about internal business practices and strategies, things it should have been doing all along. Typical.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7257411.stm
“The Commission would welcome any move towards genuine interoperability,” [the European Commission] said.
“Nonetheless, the Commission notes that today’s announcement follows at least four similar statements by Microsoft in the past on the importance of interoperability.”