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
Did hell just freeze over?
yeah, and so ……?????
YAWN on steroids…c’mon…I was hoping for something interesting.
“enhancing support for open standards”…yeah, as long as M$ IS the one to set the standards.
“Transparency”, boy the media is gonna jump all over this new phenomenom. sp
Ballmer could publicly pick his nose and it would be more interesting. Again…YAWN
If they are speaking truthfully, good on them. Otherwise, if only hollow words as always, who cares.
Microsoft always speak with forked tongue, no doubt they will spreading freedom and democracy next. They must have managed to load the Interoperability Executive Customer (IEC) Council with their shills as they have been doing with other standards bodies recently (and messing them up, like the IEEE).
The best thread on this story will probably be on Groklaw.
The only good Microsoft is a dead Microsoft.
“Brrrrrrr.”
– Satan
When Apple has a ‘big announcement’ it’s for a product that could turn computer technology upside down (Mac in ’84, iPod in 2001, multi-touch handheld in 2007).
Someone tell me what the hell Microsoft is even announcing here. Is that it that they’re more willing than ever to share their often crappy and bloated technology? Should I be happy or scared?
Could use some perspective on this . . .
I am just dying to look over 30,000 pages of new documentation.
As a consumer, I will now run and buy all M$ products, due to their now transparent policy.
I don’t get it… Why would they do this?
Micro$oft’s version of “CHANGE”
Even more boring than Hitlery and Osama’s
So Redmond uses the veil of “We see how we need to embrace open standards to ensure our customers get the best experience.”
Translation: “We understand that if we embrace open standards just enough to get people buying more of our software, we can eventually kill off those standards and keep “everyone on the plantation” with our proprietary codecs and source code.”
And MS “pledges” not to sue anyone using technology from said APIs. If you got sued and took that pledge into court the judge would probably slap you around for a while before throwing it out the window. Just wait until some competitor starts eating into MS’s income and see what happens.
I call bullshi* on this one. This would mean they admit they lied and manipulated before and that they have had a change of heart?
A leopard can’t change its spot.
If you embraced it, then your still locked in and supporting their monopoly.
Great, now they arent just stealing from Apple, they are stealing from innocent developers! Good one Microsoft.
The hardest part of web development is Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is one of the “extra” things you have to conform to get things to work right. This is utter nonsense. The web was developed for INTEROPERABILITY and platform independence. Microsoft has single handedly distorted both of these issues. I hope but would not hold my breath to how these new implementations will reflect in my particular field. One can only hope.
Since Windows Server 2008 is built on the same structure as Vista, they are probably trying to save another cash cow by preventing uncertainty with corporate IT customers. Or at least pretend to with rhetoric of openness and interoperability.
Does this mean that Apple could use the “new” public MS API’s to run Windows natively under OSX without Bootcamp or virtualization?
ODF and W3C also?
I don’t know… This sounds like Microsoft might actually be getting it through their thick heads that if they wish to maintain goodwill and have others use their products because they WANT to, they need to be more open and have better interoperability.
This could be a positive turning point for them and the rest of the computing world over the next few years. Nice to see they are going to compete on the merits of their products, not the dominance.
They can start by DUMPING Internet Explorer and just bundling Firefox with their OS.
That would be an immediate change that would be much appreciated by MILLIONS.
So, if I understand this correctly, and please tell me if I am wrong, this is a public acknowledgment that Microsoft’s use of bully tactics is no longer working, and they recognize that they have been getting their collective asses kicked lately by both competitors, and regulatory agencies, and this is an attempt to thwart off their growing insignificance, and the disdain by others of their company?
Great, now they can place the blame for the crap they make at the feet of the “Open Source Community”?
This is nothing more than a self-serving “event” to save themselves from any more lawsuits brought by the European Union.
Dude look! Isn’t that a cool giant sized Microsoft horse? Let’s roll it in and show it our proprietary code.
Just my $0.02
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.
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!
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”raspberry” style=”border:0;” />
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.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” />
“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.
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.”
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.