Microsoft Opens Up Amid Market Changes
Microsoft unveiled a set of sweeping changes to its technology and business practices on Thursday to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice.
The changes are organized into interoperability principles and corresponding actions: 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, according to the software giant's Web site.
"These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said. For 33 years, the company has shared "a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners" but this announcement represents a key expansion "toward even greater transparency," he said.
The Association for Competitive Technology's Jonathan Zuck said the move "will undoubtedly put IBM and the rest of the ECIS [European Committee for Interoperable System] companies back on their heels." ACT is backed by Microsoft and other tech companies.
"Microsoft broadened its commitment to interoperability to include all of its high volume products, leaving these competitors with little if anything left to complain or sue about," Zuck wrote on ACT's blog. "After years of hounding Microsoft in the courts and in front of governments, these competitors are now confronted with the reality that Microsoft has raised the bar on interoperability, and they too might have to measure up."
High-tech attorney Andrew Updegrove wrote on ConsortiumInfo.org that there are "a number of promises" made by Microsoft that he likes but the devil is in the details. The supporting documents "will be extremely significant, especially as regards the open source community, where subtle differences in legal terms can permit use under some open source licenses, but not others," he said.
The declaration provides "clear evidence of the effects that multiple market forces are having on Microsoft," Updegrove said. Those pressures include EU antitrust investigations, pressure of those supporting open document format, and increasingly popular Web-based alternatives from rivals such as Google and IBM.
The European Commission took note of the announcement but said it "does not relate to the question of whether or not Microsoft has been complying with EU antitrust rules in this area in the past." In January, the Commission initiated two formal antitrust investigations against Microsoft – one relating to interoperability, one relating to tying of separate software products.
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