Microsoft's CEO Steve Balmer and chief software architect Ray Ozzie held a teleconference this morning to announce a new openness strategy for the company. In a follow up press release, found here, the company says "Microsoft Corp. today 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." The steps to be taken by the company include: : (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. “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.” Looks like the Redmond giant is seeing the benefits of opening up to developers, or they are tired of all of these antitrust suits and want to appear more open... hmm? Let's hope it's not the latter.
