The Greatness of Interoperability
Today we are talking a lot about openness and interoperability in Microsoft. Maybe most of the people can't imagine this several years before.
I remember when I joined Microsoft, I talked a lot about "we should be interoperable with other software, we need to know them more deeply than now". Then a senior challenged me, and nearly shouted at me. She said I was crazy and foolish, and I should be "shot" immediately.
Time goes really fast. Things changed a lot. Now we have Open Source license, we opened our .net framework to the developers, we opened many APIs and communication protocols, we opened Office OpenXML and binary formats, we have codeplex, we have Linux and open source labs, we do emphasize interoperability wherever we can... Should I still be shot today? Isn't that what we are looking at?
Software+Services is a good story. But the foundation of it stands on openness and interoperability. If we really want to change the way we do business, we really want to innovate more and more, we really want to gather community to improve the ideas from grass root... we definately need to be OPEN. This is no longer the time we were not allowed to speak out loudly. You can see in nearly every important meeting we are talking about openness.
I think, that's why people like me, who worked on other technology and software like linux and lotus notes, are joining Microsoft. Gradually you will see more and more people carry their interoperability experience to Microsoft. And this company, will change itself to become more OPEN.
This is only the beginning.
