Microsoft Shifts Business, Will Open Up APIs
|
Written By Sepideh Saremi | February 21, 2008 | Share This
|
|
Microsoft today announced it will change the way its operations and philosophy to open up many of its products and encourage interoperability with third-party developers. With news of Microsoft’s ambitions to buy Yahoo still reverberating in the tech business world, the move is seen by many - and acknowledged by Microsoft execs - as at […]
Microsoft today announced it will change the way its operations and philosophy to open up many of its products and encourage interoperability with third-party developers. With news of Microsoft’s ambitions to buy Yahoo still reverberating in the tech business world, the move is seen by many - and acknowledged by Microsoft execs - as at least partly an effort to stave off European antitrust issues. The “strategic shift” aims for the following:
- Ensuring open connections
- Promoting data portability
- Enhancing support for industry standards
- Fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities
Last month, Microsoft was one of several high-profile companies to join Dataportability.org, a group that promotes Internet users’ ability to access/use/own their own data, regardless of platform. The move also comes at a time when companies are increasingly relying on outside development to spur their growth (see Facebook, in which Microsoft has a stake).
And because Microsoft has a bunch of products which will be affected by this initiative, the most familiar of which is its Office suite, this really points to the emergence of cloud computing and the increasing importance of Web 1.0 desktop-based software to be able to compete with free Web 2.0 products that basically do the same thing. The company seems to be applying the Facebook model to itself; could we see Microsoft apps on Facebook soon, as we had proposed the company consider? From the press release:
According to Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, 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.
It will be really curious to see what an open API could do for Office and how it will all work; though Microsoft isn’t going open-source, it is “providing a covenant” (so ominous, so biblical!) not to sue open source developers. But Matt Asay at CNET notes the “we won’t sue” promise is not new, and the biggest news is in the open APIs and the 30,000 pages of documentation that Microsoft will be revealing to developers.
Further reading:
[Full disclosure: Microsoft is a client of Reprise Media, which owns Searchviews.com.]
Topics: International, Microsoft, Open Source |