Wow, what a show!! I I attended the event as a guest of Novell to promote our work around interoperability. I had hoped to post sooner but we were extremely busy all week. To summarize, the interoperability partnership was a major driver at Novell's booth, especially the work we are doing around virtualization. We recieved a great deal of questions and were met with tremendous enthusiasm as we walked people through our strategy. Our demonstration was particulary well recieved showing Windows Server 2008 hosting SUSE Linux Enterprise server. We also highlighted the document translators in OpenOffice for the OpenXML file format, walking visitors through a seamless authoring experiece between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice 2.0. I think people are still shocked and amazed (positively, of course) when they hear our story and see that we are actually producing results. We had a great time walking visitors through our progress to date. For more information visit http://www.moreinterop.com.
Here is the CEBIT 2008 opening day with Steve Ballmer using the new Surface technology...
I volunteered at a local hospice for a few years while I was in school. During that time, in addition to some administrative support at the main office, I spent a significant amount of time with a young teenager who had been diagnosed with Duchenne ’s muscular dystrophy. If you don’t know the disease here is a brief synopsis: It is genetic. It is degenerative. And it is, unfortunately, always fatal. The young man with whom I spent time had been diagnosed with the disease in early childhood and - at the time of our first meeting - was bed-ridden and could only move his fingers. Aside from visits from me, spending time with his family, and watching TV – the remainder of his time was spent on the computer by way of a trackball mouse and special voice recognition technology.
What strikes me, when I think back about it, is that his use of the computer was probably the only autonomy and freedom he had. Any other activity - at all - was dependent on someone else. At that time, the Internet was still young by consumer standards and multimedia PC’s were just blooming. He was thrilled! Chat rooms, surfing the web, games, and email became a great past-time for him. I am happy that he had that freedom and I cannot stress how important technology was for improving his quality of life.
Now it goes without saying that technology improves everyone’s quality of life to some degree, but for those who have limitations for whatever reason – immobility, blindness, hearing loss – technology can be life changing. The challenge these days – as computing has become truly ubiquitous and more complex – is how to offer consistent and predictable experiences across form factors for those who are impaired.
Enter the latest collaboration between Microsoft and Novell: The User Interface Automation specification (details here). In short, Microsoft is releasing the specification to the technical community while working with Novell to improve cross-platform accessibility experiences. We’re already hearing positive feedback from the community, including the National Federation for the Blind, and look forward to a fruitful collaboration. After one year of working together, this announcement marks the sixth unique project that we are working on together to address our customers’ interoperability needs.
I am amazed to think about the progress we have made in such a short period of time.
As always, check out http://www.moreinterop.com for details.
For more on this announcement, see Microsoft’s presspass article here.
This morning Microsoft released a letter outlining its position and intent to foster interoperability with the Open XML file format (a recently passed ECMA international standard) and also raised concerns about competitor activity to interfere with our current ISO standardization process. The letter, a mon avis, is long overdue and I’m glad to see it published today. Anyway, I’ve thought about interoperability for some time – especially from the customer and market perspective – and have tried to figure out what, if anything, we are doing wrong or half-heartedly with respect to the Open XML file formats. After all, there have been concerns raised about our motive, the size of the specification, and the ‘openness’ of the process for its development and standardization. The letter addresses these issues pretty clearly – nothing we haven’t said before – and I find it difficult to believe that even our most ardent competitors would think this is anything but goodness. Looking at this from a logical perspective our position is pretty self explanatory in fact:
1. We focus on Customer and Industry driven interoperability: The market is the community that matters
We realize that heterogeneity happens. In response, Microsoft is fostering a pragmatic approach to achieving interoperability ‘by design’ that respects diverse technologies and business models, encourages vendor autonomy to innovate and protect IP, while meeting customer needs of managing the complexity of heterogeneous infrastructure. Examples? Sure…
a. The Interoperability Executive Customer Council has driven significant work stream activity since its first meeting in October
b. The Interoperability Vendor Alliance is evolving with Red Hat being among the most recent to join
c. Novell and Microsoft recently announced their technical roadmap
d. The Open Specification Promise has been made available to release IP for industry use
2. ECMA Standardization.
We worked through ECMA for nearly a year with key industry stakeholders - keep in mind, ECMA’s process is an open one. During its time in the technical committee, the spec grew from 2000 pages to 6000 pages. All but one company voted to approve the specification during its review for standardization – IBM. Looking at Bob Sutor’s blog (he’s the VP of Open Strategy at IBM), he states the following:
IBM voted NO today in ECMA on approval for Microsoft’s Open XML spec.
I think Rob Weir and I (as well as many others) have made it clear in the last few months why we think the (1) Open Document Format ISO standard is vastly superior to the Open XML spec. (2) ODF is what the world needs today to drive competition, innovation, and lower costs for customers. It is an example of a real open standard versus a (3) vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML.(4) ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past. We voted for the future.
Anyway, just wanted you to know.
Couple of points to consider re: those comments…
(1) ODF is incomplete, even for its own intended goals, and is currently being revised through OASIS (accessibility was a key issue in fact).
(2) ODF may be what Open Office needs today – don’t know that the world is screaming for it. If you happen to use Open Office, you may still run into the occasional Microsoft Office Open file formats –which happen to be supported by translators.
(3) What better place to start than the source of the binary files (Not sure I get how XML is proprietary?) We offered an open spec to the industry which grew into what is today. The great thing is that…
(4) While ODF is a forward thinking spec (which is fine), Open XML is backward compatible and future proofed, linking billions (yes with a ‘b’) of legacy binary files with a new world of XML based and extensible documents.
3. The size of the specification.
The spec was not intentionally written to be overly complex or involved. Granted, its long. Very long. 6000 pages. But I think it’s fair to say that we had to document all of the features plain and simple – regardless of how significant or mundane they were perceived to be. As I mentioned before, its size evolved over time as we took input from technical committee participants. The size of the specification reflects the degree of sophistication for the document authoring technology - MS Office is very robust.
4. Access and availability to Implement – No Strings Attached!
As aforementioned, Microsoft introduced an Open Specification Promise under which the Open XML specification was released. Anyone is free to implement all or a portion of the specification to fit their needs and Novell, Corel, and others, in fact, have already announced that this is part of their roadmap. The first round of implementation, of course, may take significant work – it took significant work for Microsoft. And after all, this is a major change in our own technologies to foster interoperability. Once done, however, and as the spec evolves, future iterations will be much more streamlined to implement.
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. I encourage folks to read the letter and think about what we’re doing. This is a huge step for the industry and a huge step for Microsoft. Anyone sitting in opposition to this effort must be putting their own interests before those of the market. C’mon IBM – where’s our Attaboy???
I wrote about this awhile back (or simply pointed it out) that interoperability seems to be layered in terms of organizational, or system, performance. There is 1) a technical layer, which supports 3) an operational or process layer, which both intersect to create the 2) contextual or semantic layer (numbered to stress leveling). To illustrate, think about work flows (process) that depend on productivity tools and underlying platforms (technology) that require metadata compatibility(contextual / semantic) for the information shared between functional units (viz. businesses, business units, teams, etc). Anyway, going back to my post from June on the Insurance Value chain Architecture Framework I highlighted the process, technical, and semantic interoperability that Microsoft drove with partners in the insurance industry.
If you are extremely technical (or not, for that matter) and care to dig into this (perhaps to apply to your own solution), the MSDN site has a great walk through of this framework for .NET 3.0 to solve the following point-to-point manageability problem...ouch! More here.
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I really like the way he thinks. If this subject is of interest and you've got questions about the FUD surrounding Open XML - check out this post.
If you don't know Miguel, he has done significant work in the open source community...
I hate that I missed Bill's keynote at CES, but this article provides a solid recap of some interesting philosophy on the future of technology and how we use it to drive the connected experience. Coming from the wireless space, I am very comfortable with the idea of a ubiquitous computing infrastructure that we (as consumers) navigate with a flexible, sophisticated hand-held device (think 'lifestyle' remote control). Specifically, a PDA, Cell phone, MP3 player (whatever) combines all features required to communicate, self-locate, recieve - manage - create content, and tender transactions. Imagine, now, a seamless computing environment that you simply tap into from wherever you are to access whatever information you need - regardless of the access point, and regardless of the device.
Closing the loop - we're in an age where such possibilities are now being realized and, with the convergence of mobile and fixed infrastructure, the evolution of intelligent devices, and the advancement of storage and processing technologies, the onset of new gadgetry, applications, tools, and "ways to use them" will be limitless. As a colleague of mine likes to say, we talk on computers, we drive in computers, we fly in computers, and we live in computers. The age of ubiquitous computing, suggested to have started almost 16 years ago, is now advancing at a seemingly exponential rate.
And I ask myself [a la David Byrne]...how did we get here? I mean really get here. After all, companies like ours didn't have a master plan to role this stuff out. Nor did all of this innovation happen by just a handful of companies...(Now, to interject for a moment on my own point. I bring this up because there seems to be a great deal of discussion these days about how to accelerate innovation through openness, community, and a removal of IP (think patents) from software...Open source combined with a bit of copylefting, some might argue, is the panacea for society's innovation and technical complexity woes...) It seems to me, however, that innovation has taken care of itself quite well over the years - re: how we got here, and today it is accelerating and maturing just as the market requires. The market, after all, is the community that matters. And the dialogue in that community - broadly through industry associations or standards setting organizations, or more focused through customer engagements - is sufficiently open in my opinion to drive progress and to address integration woes created by rapid innovation cycles. And intellectual property protection gives incentive to everybody in the market to keep on developing...(even the open source guys patent some things)
How do we sustain an ecosystem of heterogeneity and complexity? Keep working. Keep talking and working together. And when we make new islands of technology, simply 1) standardize enough to connect, 2) build technical bridges, 3) seed new markets or 4) all of the above.
I'm going to noodle on this a bit more. Thoughts and feedback welcome!
Time to blow the dust off of the ol' blog and chime in on our latest news. I spent some time with the Novell folks last week and must say that I am very excited about the work we'll be doing together in the coming months. Here is a link to Microsoft's press pass to highlight Wal-Mart's take on the new deal:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jan07/01-22MSWalMartPR.mspx
Slightly off-topic from my usual posts, but I got a great puzzle over the holidays and wanted to share it (and a challenge) with the rest of the blogosphere. The puzzle is called the Shipper's Dilemma and can be found at the Creative Crafthouse. There are a couple of variations - I happened to get the "z" model for which only 4 (four) know solutions exist. According to the site there are millions of ways to get "close" but, again, only a few ways to solve it. The owner's of the shop are offering $100 to the first person to come up with a new solution. The owners of the shop are offering $100 for anyone to come up with a methodical way to solve the puzzle - i.e. an analytical/repeatable approach to one of the existing (or a new solution). As I found out from the shop owners, they do not think that a methodical solution exists - simply trial and error. Not a bad deal if you've got some time to tinker with it...
So what is it exactly? The puzzle comes as a 5x5x5 cube built from 25 identical polycubes (see the photo) that must be taken apart and reassembled in one of four known ways (unless someone has a new way figured out). I spent about 6 hours working on it off and on on it before reading the accompanying note suggesting that any solution without the help of an answer sheet or solver application was statistcally unlikely. As the instructions continued, I found that getting "close" was pretty easy, but getting it right was impossible. In the end, I caved and consulted the the cheat sheet.
In spite of being insanely difficult, its a great 'thinking' puzzle - especially if you need to kill a few minutes between meetings or other projects...For puzzle fans, I would say that this is definitely an "Everest." Let me know if you crack it!
image src Creative Crafthouse, Inc.
Today marks a very important day on interoperability for Microsoft. Following a series of events that include the Open Specification Promise, the Interoperability Executive Customer Council, the Interoperability Vendor Alliance, and of course our partnership with Novell, ECMA (European association for standardizing information and communication systems - phew!) approved Microsoft's Open XML file format specification as an international standard.
The news of standardization is a welcome milestone after many months of work to develop (and document) the new file format. Leveraging an XML core, the format is not only backward compatible with billions of existing Microsoft Office documents, but is also future-proofed by complete openness and extensibility. Companies like Corel and Novell are already adopting the specification (all 6000 pages), which suggests a strong demand for the rich features that the file format will offer.
After hearing the news, I took a scan of the blogosphere to see what folks were saying. I have to admit there were some pretty serious crits out there, and I am floored that anyone can see this as a bad thing. The fact that Microsoft finally unlocked its files is a huge milestone! The fact that the specification is being adopted by other vendors so quickly is great. The fact that Open XML and other file formats (namely ODF) can co-exist - and that a translator has already been developed to go from one to the other - demonstrates tremendous value for the market! All goodness!
For those who are curious, Open XML is a very necessary effort. One file format specification will not work for all document authoring tools as the Open Document format has readily demonstrated. While the ODF became an ISO standard nearly seven months ago, its authors chose "right now" over "right," in terms of features. The specification is largely incomplete - lacking support for such things as accessibility and formulas (currently being addressed), which are key elements needed for effective usability (More on that at McGibbon's blog).
In terms of Microsoft's decision to evolve the file format, we realized that new technologies afforded us the opportunity to make our files more flexible for customers. Years ago, when the binary formats were developed, the technical ecosystem was a much different space. Today, formats and protocols allow us to link virtually any technology to another, suggesting that the nature of documents would, could, and should evolve. Today, we see a distinct seperation of content from presentation or formatting. What sits between the two is metadata providing a description for what the document's content contains. This has become a best practice for web development, and is now happening for documents as well. In the end, documents and their content become much more fluid in terms of how they are used, accessed, and managed. The great news for Microsoft Office users is that they have much greater access to, and control over, their data through this open file format.
OpenOffice, incidentally, is free to implement the specification just as Novell and Corel have done...
As a final thought, I think its very telling that IBM was the only ECMA participant to vote against the standardization of Open XML. For a company who's Vice President of Standards pitches openness, choice, and innovation, it seems odd that they would not support the standardization of a file format that was so valuable to so many of IBM's current customers!
Self serving? Makes me wonder. More thoughts on that in a previous post...
If you have 30 minutes and are keenly interested in how Microsoft's new Open Specification Promise works, check out this video at Channel 9. Included in the clip are Jean Paoli, General Manager of Interoperability & XML Architecture; Tom Robertson, General Manager of IP and Corportate Standards Strategy; and Amy Marasco, General Manager of Standards Strategy. I worked on parts of the project for Amy and Tom, and work closely with all three on other efforts. Check it out here...
Over the summer, I spent some time travelling through Europe to meet with a number of customers and industry leaders to discuss interoperability. While on the road, I had the privilege of meeting with some open source developers (and business owners) who came by our Warsaw office to share their thoughts on software development, licensing, and – of all things – how they could work more closely with Microsoft. In the end, we had a great conversation and they were extremely pleased that Microsoft was expressing interest in their community and way of thinking. We are definitely interested in working alongside this community, and - jumping ahead four months - today’s announcement between Microsoft and Novell solidified that sentiment tenfold.
This is great news of course, but before commenting on the announcement itself, I think it’s worth noting that we have been doing some great work with the open source community for awhile now. This was highlighted today, in fact, during our announcement as Bill Hilf was called out by name by Novell’s Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Jeff Jaffe. If you are not familiar with Hilf’s work, his team is responsible, among other efforts, for open source community outreach at Microsoft. His team maintains port25 where they publish an array of original articles, interviews (check out Woz!), and papers on various technical topics. Well worth checking out the site if you haven’t been there yet. If you’re a developer, check out codeplex…
A small tangent, but all this to say that Microsoft is deeply committed to working more closely with the open source community regardless of any difference to business or development model – and proving that it is doable to the benefit of all stakeholders. In the end, the customer is who we serve, and that puts the onus on us (as vendors) to balance innovation, intellectual property, and interoperability for their benefit.
So in terms of the announcement, there are a lot of posts on this already. I won’t go into too many details. But here is a brief recap.
The spirit of the announcement?
Customers first. This was discussed in depth by both companies and shored up by Randy Cowen, CIO from Goldman Sachs. Cowen incidentally was credited as one of the key accounts requesting that both companies explore this relationship. In turn, both CEO’s expressed a deep desire to still compete with one another, but also pointed out that cooperation through joint innovation and licensing was necessary to best meet the needs of a heterogeneous market.
The relationship?
Interoperability, collaboration, and IP licensing complemented by joint investment in research, marketing, and support.
Patents
Microsoft and Novell are agreeing to give customers assurance of protection against patent infringement claims assuring that the technologies they deploy are compliant with both companies’ patents. Key to this relationship as stated in our press release…
“As part of this agreement, Microsoft will provide a covenant not to assert its patent rights against customers who have purchased SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or other covered products from Novell, and Novell will provide an identical covenant to customers who have a licensed version of Windows or other covered products from Microsoft.”
Joint Research
Microsoft and Novell will develop a joint research facility to test and develop interoperable solutions.
Virtualization – empowering customers to run virtualized Windows on Suse Linux or virtualized Suse Linux on Windows
Managing Mixed Environments – The companies will work together to make it easier for customers to manage mixed environments and to deploy directory services.
Document Formats – Novell will support the development of translators to help OpenOffice users benefit from Microsoft’s Open XML file format. Novell has supported the ECMA TC45 standardization for some time now.
There is much more detail to the story, but I think these snippets paint a pretty solid picture of how we intend to work with one another. I think this is a great move for both companies and look forward to seeing these projects get underway. For those interested, Novell has posted a streaming clip of the press announcement on their site here in Flash or Windows Media format. Also worth a look (approx. 15 minutes).
Following this link over to wired magazine, you'll read about a forthcoming movie called The Fountain created by Darren Aronofsky. The trailer is pretty impressive and might make you think that this was another sci-fi spectacular complete with any number of visual effects technicians working feverishly behind the scenes. The truth however is a bit surprising. According to the article Aronofsky ran into a bit of trouble while making the film (backers left, actors left) so his budget and resources were quite thin. Enter the Parks brothers (Chris and Peter) who were commissioned to develop some very unique visual effects through rather innovative means. Instead of leveraging the latest CGI tools, the Parks brothers turned to their artwork which consists of videography and photography of various fluid based materials. I found one of the brothers' websites here (Chris Parks Art) which explains the process in more depth. You'll also see some great examples of their other projects - all very impressive. Here is a shot from the film which apparently consists of just a few microliters of iodine mixed with baby oil. Should be worth a look just for the effects...
Image Source: Wired Magazine
This morning Zend and Microsoft announced a technical collaboration to drive improved performance for running PHP on Windows Server. Having worked with both technologies on multiple projects, I think this is timely and a great effort toward improved interoperability for the developer community as a whole. Granted, PHP has been running on Windows for some time, but simply 'running on' is not enough. This collaboration ensure that leading technologies - while developed under different models and by different organizations - will work together optimally for the benefit of the user. Specific to the project, I thought the scope was particularly interesting:
- Identify and implement improvements for PHP on IIS6 and IIS7 (32 bit and 64 bit) with that will be submitted under the PHP license to the PHP community.
- Microsoft will develop and release an IIS add-on component (FastCGI) that will serve as the interface between PHP and the IIS webserver - made freely available for users of Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server ‘Longhorn.’
- Zend will establish a Windows testing lab and conduct regular tests to foster improved performance as technologies evolve.
- Zend and Microsoft will actively participate in community outreach.
Public releases of this effort are expected over the next couple of months. Read more over at port 25...
I owe Chris Vidotto and team down under for bringing this to my attention (they blog a day ahead of me of course). The news? Biztalk 2006 was written up in InfoWorld recieving a rating of Excellent for enterprise interoperability. Read the article or check out the videocast...