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
Wow this is big news, I can’t wait to see the implementations taking place.
(1) ensuring open connections; Does this mean they will allow the magnificent MacOSX to connect to the machines that have been MS only? Now that would be something.
(2) promoting data portability; Is that like downloading music from the MS music store and being able to play it not only on the 3 Zunes but iPods as well? Or is is just another “we plan to supplant Adobe’s pdf standard?
(3) enhancing support for industry standards; Does this mean actually supporting the standards that the industry has set (like for the web) or supporting the standards that it has set, since MS perceives itself as the industry standard (direct X for a vomiting example)?
(4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities. Does this mean more marketing of the engagements MS is taking towards the open source community? Maybe a TV show like “MS War Engagements on Iraq, oops the Open Source Community.”
Sounds like verbal diarrhea to me.
And then of course there is Zune Thang. Gosh he must have lost have his brain capacity with the neuron misfiring. Let’s check out the quote.
“Microsoft makes the whole widget and that’s all you need.” and “Vista + Windows Mobile + xBox + Zune. All you need.”
Notice that with this “all you need concept” I doubt you could write a word document or excel spreasheet. You kinda need something else…a device called a computer. Now what brand of desktop and portable computers does MS make Zune Thang?
Your doomed Zune Thang.™
The strategy now is to focus on KILLING MS EXCHANGE in the enterprise. This is high priority. Get rid of Exchange. It’s MS’s stronghold in the enterprise.
Next up: Why use MS formats and APIs? MS should change their S/W to be interoperable with open APIs.
Third: Opening up documentation does not mean giving patents into the public domain. You can build stuff with MS APIs, just be ready to get sued for IMPLEMENTATION of those methods.
Does anyone know if Shawn Kemp is going to return to the NBA this year?
Basically they had to do this to avoid paying the European Union a ton of extra money.
Whenever someone comes out with something that whoops Microsoft, they announce a future better product. They fight products with smoke. That is what they are trying to do here.
more vapourware
… and btw they still don’t get it. The press release reminds me of using Windows: lots of options, categories and details, but at the end of the day no real information and they still dont get it:
It’s about PEOPLE, stupid
mw: answer
I did a shit the other day, that was interoperable with my butt and toilet
This sounds well-meaning (and indeed may have shreds of original good intentions), but I have some doubts. Particularly around this phrase (and variants of it that appear several times):
“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.”
The English translation of that is, “Sure, you can freely look at and play with our protocols and APIs, but if you want to use them for anything resembling real work, be prepared to pay us.” The second part of the sentence is a little murky, but I read it as implying that even though the open source community will be allowed to tinker with this stuff for free, any company that adopts the resulting open source code will promptly have Microsoft on their doorstep demanding payment (er, I mean, providing the opportunity to obtain a license). Lovely.
Consider an analogy. Most people know that Apple has licensed WebKit to the wider world to access the full source code, contribute to the product, and create their own variants for use pretty much wherever (Google Android, Adobe AIR, Nokia smartphones, etc.). If Apple were following the new Microsoft model, however, what they would have done instead of all this would have been simply to tell everyone “OK, here is some free documentation for how to write plug-ins for Safari and make your web pages work better with Safari. But if you make any money off of doing so, you owe us.”
That 30,000 pages of documents thing seems a bit fishy too. Sounds a bit like “our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion.” I can see the MS legal office now: “I know, let’s bury the European Comission in a documentation blizzard and smokescreen it with lots of conferences on interoperability.”
I think that a lot of people are missing the true meaning of this announcement: MICROSOFT IS DYING.
I made the statement several years ago that the day that Microsoft starts playing by other people’s rules instead of it’s own is the day that they announce their death…
And today Microsoft just admitted this publicly.
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.
HAHAHAHAHA LMFASSOFF!!!
Oh jesus, I needed that laugh so bad.
If they follow through with it, I think it’s a huge benefit for both Microsoft, and the computing community.
This actually touches on probably my biggest criticism of Apple: they think they know better than all of us. Sure, they know better than some. However, some of us like flexibility in their computers and electronic products and to have the ability to make custom builds or otherwise do something out-of-the-translucent-box. Even silly little things like being able to replace a battery ourselves…
I own 2 macs, after switching from windows about a year and a half ago (I am soooo happy with my macs, I can’t STAND windows anymore, and saying that from me is huge, I used to be a HUGE windows fanatic, but now I can’t function on windows). But anyways, the first thing I’d do after I reinstalled XP (had to do that 3 times a year) the first thing I downloaded was Firefox or any other browser I could get my hands on.