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Interoperability: The Other Side of Our Settlement with the European Commission
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Posted by Dave Heiner
Vice President and Deputy General Counsel
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On Wednesday the European Commission announced its decision to approve a resolution of its long-running competition law inquiry concerning Microsoft. Commissioner Kroes remarked that the decision has the potential to herald a “new, more positive” era in Microsoft’s relationship with the Commission. We are obviously very pleased to reach this milestone. We’ve posted the details here.
While most of the press attention has focused on the Commission’s decision regarding Web browser software in Windows, the Commission also announced Microsoft’s agreement to implement a series of measures to promote interoperability. The interoperability piece is important too because consumers of everything from cell phones to mainframe computers want assurances that their products will work seamlessly with other devices, software and services. In speeches in June 2008 and this October, Commissioner Kroes outlined a vision for how leading firms should address competition law concerns relating to interoperability. Commissioner Kroes championed industry standards as “the foundation of interoperability.” Products from different firms can work well together when they implement common, well-designed industry standards. In addition, when firms innovate in a proprietary manner, Commissioner Kroes observed, interoperability can be facilitated if firms (i) disclose sufficient technical information to enable other firms to build interoperable products; (ii) provide other firms with a remedy if the technical information disclosed is not complete and accurate and (iii) charge fair royalty rates for any intellectual property that is needed.
As part of the settlement announced Wednesday, Microsoft has pledged to implement this approach to interoperability across all of our most widely used products—Windows, Windows Server, Office, Exchange and SharePoint.
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Improving E-Government Interoperability--Beyond Technology
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Posted by Steve Mutkoski
Senior Standards Strategist
Steve Mutkoski speaking at the Internet Governance Forum in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt
While participating in e-Government panel discussions on three continents last month, I heard loudly that the impediments to effective e-Government interoperability are no longer primarily technical. Leading policymakers, practitioners and academics agreed that the real challenges today are semantic, organizational, legal and political. You can have perfect technical interconnection of your information systems, for example, but you won’t have interoperability unless people in different agencies know how to collaborate on information sharing and are willing to do so.
This human factor was spotlighted on the first page of the program for the United Nations University 3rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, which noted “growing recognition that over-reliance on technology, insufficient collaboration in government, lack of building human capacity and inadequate public consultation all limit possible benefits of [e-Government] initiatives.” The bulk of the presentations focused on these non-technical impediments to e-Government.
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Day 2 Interop -- Discussions at O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit
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Posted By Teresa Carlson,
Vice President, Microsoft Federal
(Cross-posted from the Microsoft FutureFed blog)
The dialogue continued in DC today at the O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit. From the IT infrastructure to the cloud, interoperability was a common theme, deemed critical by industry and government leaders, on par with reliability and security. In fact, Tim O’Reilly said today, “I’m a big believer in interop and want to see a world where cloud services are interoperable.”
I’m glad this topic bubbled to the top of the Summit today, because interop was the focus of a panel discussion led by Microsoft’s Federal Civilian CTO Susie Adams. Susie was joined by Susan Heystee, VP and General Manager of Global Strategic Alliances at Novell, and Bryan Kirschner, VP for Corporate Strategies at Greenberg Quinlan Rosner. In their “Getting to Gov 2.0” session, they explored how to enable interoperability in government IT and how an open platform with appropriate security, identity, and scalability fosters Government 2.0.
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Microsoft’s Proposal to the European Commission
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Posted by David Bowermaster
Administrator, Microsoft on the Issues
Microsoft recently made a proposal to the European Commission to address competition law concerns that the Commission has raised with regard to Internet Explorer and the interoperability of certain Microsoft products. The Commission issued a statement concerning the proposal today, and we subsequently issued a statement from General Counsel Brad Smith.
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Open Government Doesn’t Equal Open Source
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Posted by Teresa Carlson
Vice President of U.S. Federal Government Sales
(Cross-posted from the Microsoft FutureFed blog)
The term “open” has many different connotations across the federal landscape. According to the president, open government is the promise of transparency, public participation, and bridging the divide between citizens and their government. When it comes to technology, some are connecting the vision of open government with open source software development, but that connection is false and self-serving.
Yesterday, Government Computer News reported that government agencies are increasingly embracing open source software, some in an attempt to lower IT costs. And although many open source applications make sense for specific agency challenges, the idea that open source always equals cost savings is debatable. In fact, a recent Gartner report states that “through 2013, 50% of mainstream IT projects using open-source software (OSS) will not achieve cost savings over closed-source alternatives.” The report goes on to say that although organizations can save on license fees through open source, “they are often merely shifting costs from one area to another (for example, commercial operation support to internal employee support).”
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A Transparent Look at Office 2010
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Posted by Tom Robertson
Associate General Counsel
Last week was exciting for Microsoft as we hosted the 2009 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC 09) in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. We made announcements for our company and our partners that will help create opportunities for the IT industry and benefit IT users around the globe.
In my last blog post I took the opportunity of the release of Microsoft Office 2007 service pack 2 to explain how openness and transparency are vital steps in a larger, industry-wide effort to make interoperability a reality. In this post I want to take a closer look at how our efforts to be transparent as to the technical interfaces of our products promote real-world interoperability.
On Monday July 13th, we announced that Office 2010 and related products are available for technical preview by invitation-only. While the products won’t be widely available until 2010, we have already published, in conjunction with the technical preview, thousands of pages of detailed technical specifications for the protocols used by Microsoft products to communicate with Office 2010. The documentation describes each protocol in detail, including technical requirements, limitations, dependencies, and other protocol behavior. Anyone in the world with a web browser is free to review it anytime they want without charge.
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Working with the White House to Make the “Smart Grid” a Reality
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Posted by Anoop Gupta
Corporate Vice President, Technology Policy and Strategy
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending a leadership dialogue hosted by U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke to discuss the development of interoperability standards for a national “Smart Grid.” Along with executives from leading electric utilities, industry associations and technology firms, I offered my view on what it will take to make the country’s power grid smart, reliable and more secure.
At Microsoft, we believe the energy grid becomes "smart" by injecting software into the various control points in the grid, so that people and businesses have ready access to timely, user-friendly information that can help them make smart choices about their energy use.
We also envision a world where thousands of smart appliances can seamlessly plug into homes thanks to common standards and interoperability frameworks, just as the “plug and play” model allows thousands of devices to seamlessly plug into PCs today.
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