If you've been following Microsoft's interoperability moves over the past several years, you may be familiar with the fact that the software giant has pledged to be more "open" many times, in many different ways. For the most part, however, Microsoft has fallen far short of the idealized model of openness that's advocated by the Open Source movement, of course, due largely to the vast success the company has realized over the decades from its proprietary approach to software development. The world, of course, is changing. (See my blog posts about this trend, called cloud computing, for more information.) And though Microsoft continues to make seemingly half-hearted efforts to open up in order to meet the changing needs of its customers, the company's primary goal has always been the protect and extend its core markets: Windows, Windows Server, and Office. For example, when the secret sauce of its proprietary Office document formats was seen as the key to its stranglehold on the office productivity market, Microsoft held those formats close to the vest, forcing competitors to reverse engineer them and offer, at best, only partial support for these most crucial of data types. But when national and local governments around the world began voicing concerns about storing their data in these proprietary formats and actively began seeking open alternatives, Microsoft reversed course. It created the so-called Open XML document formats and offered them up as international standards. Here, Microsoft's strategy changed with the times, but as always the key goal was protecting one its core markets, in this case Office.
Last week, Microsoft made a sweeping announcement (see the Microsoft Web site for details) to expand the interoperability of its most high-volume products, opening a new era of openness that I suspect is largely the handiwork of Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, finally cashing in on his influence in the waning days of retiring Chairman Bill Gates, who would almost assuredly never have allowed such a change had he still been in charge of the company. The announcement seemed directed at a lot of different groups: The third party developers who would now be able to create solutions that integrate more seamlessly with Microsoft's products, yes, but also at antitrust regulators in Europe and the corporate foes opposing its bid to make Open XML an ISO standard.
