Another big step in the right direction

Microsoft has continued to improve in the area of interoperabillity in the recent past and today is a big day in that regard.  I spend a lot of time talking to our customers about our efforts in interoperablity, fighting some past perceptions of Microsoft.  Most of these discussions are in the SOA space where a set of standards (XML, WSDL, SOAP, WS-*, ...) have played a big part in making interoperability for applciaitons real.  Today, Microsoft announced a major step towards even more interoperablity; see the press release and the interoperablity site for all the details, the highlights for me are below:

•  ... starting today Microsoft will openly publish on MSDN over 30,000 pages of documentation for Windows client and server protocols that were previously available only under a trade secret license through the Microsoft Work Group Server Protocol Program (WSPP) and the Microsoft Communication Protocol Program (MCPP).
• To promote user choice among document formats, Microsoft will design new APIs for the Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications in Office 2007 to enable developers to plug in additional document formats and to enable users to set these formats as their default for saving documents.

Both of these are major steps and in the end should help our customers to give them more choice.