brent’s blog : Interoperability is People First…
Jason Matusow recommended Brent. Certainly the above post got me thinking about human, rather than technical interoperability. How can we work more effectively together, and what limitations do our technology choices make in that light. Managed versus Unmanaged spaces, the role of open data and so on.
I recently met up with Jason and his boss Tom Robertson, Microsoft’s General Manager of Standards. For those of you that think Microsoft already does a god job of managing the standards creation and adoption process, I hereby serve notice that you probably ain’t seen nothing yet.
Microsoft is pulling together all of its standards and interoperability efforts under a single organisation. Every contributor will be seen as an asset to manage.
Jason did a phenomenal job helping to turn around Microsoft thinking on the role of open and shared source software. Never mind get the facts, Jason helped Microsoft get a clue.
If I have a criticism its an obvious one. If you’re going to create an interoperability council its pretty much pointless without the participation of other vendors-the obvious first two partners would be Sun and JBoss. Interesting note: google Microsoft Sun Interoperability and there is not a single link from Microsoft in the top ten). JBoss on the other hand is number one.
While I certainly applaud efforts to engage customers in standards dialogues, I do see this initiative as needing contributions from Microsoft point to point integration partners… that is de facto vs de jure.
But all in all, if People Ready helps Microsoft think more cogently about interoperability then I am all for it.
Tags: jason matusow, interoperability
Ric says:
June 20, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Looking at the references at the end of the blog posts, it seems to me that the Microsofties have a cloistered view. I know there’s a lot of them, and there’s some very smart folk amongst them, but I would have thought there were a lot more interesting things said about interoperability outside of Microsoft.
Jaime Cardoso says:
June 21, 2006 at 11:43 am
James, do you really believe that Microsoft will ever do a push towards standards? Will their flag products (Office, Exchange, IIS) be able to compete (and not lose a significant market share) if they don’t depend on proprietary formats to create significant problems to anyone trying to get in?
I believe that if they were moving towards an Open world, they would be pushing the technical merits of their products, a thing MS stopped doing a long time ago.
What do you think?