Microsoft open plan splits critics

I GOT A CALL yesterday at about three o’clock, suggesting that Microsoft was about to make a major announcement. Ballmer, Muglia, Ozzie and Brad Smith to speak. Not Yahoo or M &A-related, but no other clues.

At times like this, the mind goes into overdrive. Was it about the demo
that made Robert Scoble cry? Nah, surely not. That’s supposed to come next week and will maybe be a Silverlight-based front-end to counter Adobe AIR.

So what the heck is it? Ah, here’s the press release and it’s about opening up and documenting APIs. So listen in to the conference call, scribble notes and collect quotes. Then ask people who might know what this really meant.

I spoke to Matt Asay, a senior exec at Alfresco, which makes an enterprise content management software program that competes face to face with Microsoft SharePoint. Alfresco is also open source so Asay is hardly the kind you might expect to be sympathetic to Microsoft.

And yet he was positive, suggesting this “opens the floodgates” for companies seeking interoperability with Microsoft without having to develop workarounds. Also, the announcement yesterday was of a piece with recent interoperability efforts that has seen Microsoft work closely with peers, industry bodies and even open-source types.

Of course, he was also a little cautious, noting that not all the documentation he had seen so far might be up to snuff, and agreeing that we still have to see how far Microsoft lives up its promises.

As Asay noted, “manna will not fall from heaven … and Steve Ballmer is not going to work for the Red Cross”. This is not a charitable donation but more likely a move nudged by Microsoft’s desire to square things with regulators, and pave the way for acceptance of OOXML as a genuine standard. But Asay is betting that the Microsoft statement is for real, and very significant.

On his blog, Asay concluded with the thought that “the real question now is how the open-source community will react. Is Microsoft too convenient a nemesis to abandon cheaply?”

Cross over to the other side of the fence to find out and you see Red Hat and its statement on the Microsoft announcement.

Red Hat general counsel Michael Cunningham sets the tome early on: “Red Hat regards this most recent announcement with a healthy dose of skepticism.”

He goes on to call for Microsoft to give up on OOXML, extend the Open Specification Promise, and broaden promises not to sue to include commercial implementations. So it’s safe to say there was no party at Red Hat HQ.

That pretty well sums up the polar responses on the Microsoft statement, divided roughly equally between those who think that this is excellent news and those who think it might well be a ruse, possibly including a plan to steal your wife and kids, then stealth-install Windows to run your central-heating system.

My mind goes back to the time in the early 1990s when AMD was complaining about incomplete and damaged documentation provided by Intel for second-source cloned processors. When a dog has a bad name it’s hard to change perceptions. And maybe, even if Microsoft is being straight up this time, they never really change. µ