Microsoft makes strategic changes in business practices

Microsoft Corp announced a set of broad-reaching changes to its technology and business practices to increase the openness of its products and drive greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for developers, partners, customers and competitors.

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products; ensuring open connections; promoting data portability; enhancing support for industry standards; and (4) fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

"These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies," said Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer. "For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but the announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency.

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."

According to Microsoft chief software architect Ray Ozzie, the company's announcement reflects the significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing.

As heterogeneity is the norm within enterprise architectures, interoperability across applications and services has become a key requirement.

"Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions," said Ozzie. "By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers."

"The principles and actions announced today by Microsoft are a very significant expansion of its efforts to promote interoperability," said vice president, Corporate Research and Technology, Software and Engineering, Siemens Manfred Wangler.

"While Microsoft has made considerable progress on interoperability over the past several years, including working with us on the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, today's news take Microsoft's interoperability commitment to a whole new level," he said.

The interoperability principles and actions 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, and future versions of all the products.