Microsoft opens up… really?
Sigh, yesterday was one of those days on which Microsoft tells the world it wants to open up. Steve Ballmer announced a new initiative to open up Microsoft products for better interoperability with competing products and technologies. This is hard to believe because the traditional business model of Microsoft has been “vendor lock-in”. Encrypting your data in a proprietary format without telling you how to access that is not helping clients but holding their data for ransom (licenses). Will Microsoft really change it ways now?…
Update: okay, we’re all on the same page again. Read the analysis at groklaw.
Microsoft claims it wants to open up and is embracing four new interoperability principles:
- Ensuring open connections
- Promoting data portability
- Enhancing support for industry standards
- Fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including the open source community
Now this really seems like a huge step forward and helping independent software developers. However the devil is in the details. It is always the little things. Many of the proposed opening up is not compatible with the GPL license according to Red Hat who are not impressed with Microsofts plans.
In the back of my mind a little voice warns me that this might be just another trick to push their standards. Giving others access to your ’software technology’ by documenting it is also a way to spread your technology. A technology will become a (defacto) standard when it is widely supported and used by developers.
When you look at the OOXML versus the Open Document Format clash you will notice that Microsoft is still trying to impose standards. OOXML was rejected as a standard. That could be easily done since no one is using OOXML besides being the inferior standard. This might be just another way to get Microsofts technology in the field and in widespread use.
Maybe time will proof me wrong but I still feel Microsoft is not really opening up. This thought is not (just ) because I think the Microsoft corporation is evil. The thought comes from the fact that when Microsoft really wants to open up it only needs to embrace only one interoperability principle instead of four:
- From now on we will support industry standards and formats and we will adhere strictly to those.
Now that is opening up. That’s embracing interoperability. Why doesn’t Microsoft do that? Because this is just another trick up Steve’s sleeve. Wait and see…
Tags: interoperability, Microsoft, standards