Brent Phillips - Interoperability Blog : IP

common ground between Microsoft and the OSS community is more common than not these days...

brentphillips — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:15:00 GMT

When I speak to an audience about Microsoft's partnership with Novell, I often frame the discussion around two themes: customer centricity and IP bridge building. The former deals with the fact that vendors should proactively work together to solve interoperability issues in the market (with partners and competitors alike), while the latter deals with a healthy respect for diverse business models and finding common ground on how to partner and work together. In the case of Novell, we worked through an innovative patent cooperation agreement that paved the way for healthy business and technical collaboration. The resulting partnership has yielded a number of technical innovations, a joint lab in Cambridge, MA, and has served hundreds of customers. While we continue to compete, we also acknowledge that this model is a successful one - - for the pragmatist IT community who needs to improve operational efficiency in their data center, cut costs, and get better support from their vendors - we are succeeding.

In a similar spirit of cooperation - this time to support the broader software ecosystem - Microsoft in partnership with the Linux Foundation, sent a joint letter to the American Law Institute, last week, expressing concerns over its draft Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. You can follow the link to download the letter, but to summarize briefly, there were concerns about 1) how the principles were drafted (apparently with little or no input from industry) and 2) proposed principles not supported by contract law.

As written, according to the Linux Foundation's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, the principles "interfere with the natural operation of open source licenses and commercial licenses as well by creating implied warranties that could result in a tremendous amount of unnecessary litigation, which would undermine the sharing of technology." Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, shares similar concerns at microsoftontheissues.com, stating that " certain provisions do not reflect existing law and could disrupt the well-functioning software market for businesses and consumers, as well as create uncertainty for software developers."

Our business models differ, ideologies sometimes differ, but we share, as Gutierrez states, a passion for software and a need to keep the industry from being inadvertently disrupted. There is power in such collaboration, and I am glad to see our organizations working together for the good of the vendor and developer community. Its true that we often find ourselves in competitive positions, but ensuring that we sustain a healthy, market-driven economy where the diversity of business models is honored and supported, is well worth the effort.

Check out Stephen McGibbon's blog for additional links and thoughts on how this might apply to the EU...

dell.com/interop

brentphillips — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:23:00 GMT

I'm excited to share that Dell just launched their solutions portal for hardware and service offerings that support the Microsoft-Novell Interoperability partnership. Briefly, as part of Dell's own efforts to help customers reduce complexity and improve performance in the data center, customers can purchase a preconfigured Dell box that includes SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as an optimized guest on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. In today's economic climate, these are great tools to help customers more quickly realize efficiencies and reduce costs for their mixed environments. Please visit dell.com/interop to learn more.

The connected experience and a bit on how we got here...

brentphillips — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:46:00 GMT

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!

Wal-mart on-board for Microsoft and Novell partnership

brentphillips — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:44:00 GMT

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

Open XML approved by ECMA

brentphillips — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 07:13:00 GMT

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...

Need details on the Open Spec Promise? Check out Channel 9...

brentphillips — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 21:53:00 GMT

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...