Microsoft announces open standards push -- again

by Brad Linder Feb 21st 2008

Microsoft is promising to take steps to improve interoperability with competing technologies. This is hardly the first time Microsoft has made such promises, although in the past the company has usually waited until it received a few pokes from one regulatory agency or another.

Microsoft will make APIs and other information available for 6 "high-volume" products:

Windows Vista
Windows Server 2008
SQL Server 2008
Office 2007
Exchange Server 2007
Office SharePoint Server 2007

Developers will not need to pay royalties or any other fees to access these APIs and communication protocols. Microsoft will be publishing over 30,000 pages of documentation on MSDN that had previously only been available under a trade secret license.

From a more practical level, Microsoft will be designing new APIs for Office 2007 that will make it easier for users to choose between a variety of document formats. The company is also launching an "open source interoperability initiative" that should result in better communication between Microsoft products and open source alternatives like OpenOffice.org.

Lest you should think this latest push is entirely altruistic, Mary Jo Foley points out that ISO is scheduled to discuss the standarization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format next week. If Microsoft doesn't get the ISO standard, the company could lose out on government contracts that require open standards.

Tags: api, interoperability, msdn, open-standards

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

aMIGA_dUDE said 1:12PM on 2-21-2008

Wow, the power of Europe in action!

Right on.

Todd said 1:26PM on 2-21-2008

Thank you for bringing up Microsoft's sabotage of Open Document:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Document#Worldwide_adoption

you may expect the same hostile intent behind this new attempt at "openness".

Laocoön, priest of Troy, who, in Virgil's Aeneid, tells his countrymen to "Beware Greeks bearing gifts". Both German and English have expressions related to “Greeks bearing gifts”, but they don't use the same idioms. While English concentrates on warning against Greeks with gifts, German emphasizes the gift itself. Ein Danaergeschenk is a “fatal gift” that brings misfortune or causes problems.

Gardiner Westbound said 11:19PM on 2-21-2008

I have been using MS Office 2000. It does everything I want to do, however, the next time I reformat my hard drive I'm going with Open Office. I don't want to spend $300 for an up-to-date version of MS Office.

Joshua Clayton said 12:00PM on 2-22-2008

I have to say I could probably care less. Just make Internet Explorer render webpages properly. Talk about not following standards!

a guy said 1:06PM on 2-24-2008

I don't get it. Does this mean Windows Vista's source code will be open for people to see?

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