The latest on digital design trends and consumer behavior from Avenue A | RazorfishMicrosoft Expands Open Initiatives and Interoperability
February 24th, 2008 by Dawa RileyTags: Digital Consumer Behavior, expands, facebook, General, initiatives, interoperability, microsoft, open, role, Web 2.0
In a press release last week, Microsoft announced that it would increase the openness of its products by adhering to four new interoperability principles including ensuring open connections, promoting data portability, enhancing support for industry standards and fostering more open engagement with open source communities.
For a company which has often been criticized for its closed source proprietary stance, the announcement represents a momentous strategic decision and one which considerably benefits solutions providers, businesses and end users. By permitting interoperability with existing technologies and allowing access to information from their products in open formats via APIs, Microsoft is enabling developers and third party vendors to create customized and innovative solutions for their customers.
The press release states that the interoperability principles and actions will 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. Microsoft will make documentation for all application programming interfaces (APIs) available on its website. Additionally, it will not require developers to have a license or pay a fee to access this information and promises that ‘third-party developers can connect to Microsoft’s high-volume products just as Microsoft’s other products do.’
According to Steve Ballmer ‘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.’
In an industry that is increasingly moving towards open standards and places high value on customization, collaboration, connectivity and choice it seems a smart move on the part of Microsoft to join the open revolution rather than get left behind as it’s competitors and the industry continues to champion such initiatives. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft plans to interface their Open Source Interoperability initiative with the existing Data Portability initiatives which Google and Facebook joined earlier last month. It will be even more interesting to see what innovative new products and services emerge as a result of all this openness.
3 Responses to “Microsoft Expands Open Initiatives and Interoperability”
This is one pretty amazing announcement! I wonder if Mr. Ballmer will mention anything about this during the Heroes Happen {Here} software launch events?
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Nico del Castillo
Microsoft 2008 Joint Launch Team
http://www.microsoft.com/2008jointlaunch
Let’s hope Mr. Ballmer does mention it - I would be interested to know whether Microsoft’s open initiatives are in part a response to the European Union court ruling, competitor initiatives or whether it is part of a longer term business strategy?
(Nico, I tried going to url in your post and it returns a page not found error.)
Really? It’s a vanity URL that should lead to the following:
http://www.microsoft.com/heroeshappenhere/register/default.mspx
I know there were some issues and the page went down a couple of times when some of the events “sold” out, but it should work okay now.
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Nico del Castillo
Microsoft 2008 Joint Launch Team
http://www.microsoft.com/2008jointlaunch