Microsoft VP: Interoperability, Cross-Platform Efforts Go Back 30 Years

Two weeks ago, Microsoft tested its "four toolsets for interoperability" message on the public and the press, which included an interview with BetaNews. That message has apparently been given the green light, as Corporate VP for Emerging Business Dan'l Lewin fired a shot across the bow last Thursday, in a blog posting directed toward Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen.

In April, Chizen made an oft-repeated comment in response to Microsoft's debut of Silverlight, its graphical front-end tools platform that was the culmination of its WPF/E ("Everywhere") project. At that time, Chizen stated, "Microsoft, historically, has never demonstrated a commitment to maintaining a cross-platform solution."

Of course, you know, this means war. Fade to black, and two months later, Lewin - a former colleague of Chizen's at Apple - delivers a retort that, while civil in tone, attempts to paint Adobe into a corner by demonstrating Microsoft has greater gravitas with governments, standards agencies, and customer segments than Adobe could ever hope to achieve.

"Cross-platform support is a small part of our overall interop commitment," Lewin writes, "and we have a strong commitment to both. We think it's an important point because our support for real interoperability affects the ability of our customers to drive value from their IT investments and affects the ability of our ISV partners - large and small - to provide solutions that work in the heterogeneous world in which we live and work. We get that. We want to reach out to the broadest audience, and that means going where the audience is - on our platform, yes absolutely, and on others."

The roots of Microsoft's cross-platform commitment go back three decades, Lewin suggests, to Apple's inclusion of Microsoft BASIC in the boot ROMs of the Apple II. (Historians may note that BASIC was the Microsoft platform in 1977, having also been included in the Levels I and II boot ROMs of Radio Shack's TRS-80. A few years later, Microsoft would license its first major operating system, TRSDOS, to Radio Shack, though it had yet to be considered "the Microsoft platform." Meanwhile, Steve Wozniak would produce Apple's first disk operating system for the Disk II floppy disk drives, which borrowed nothing whatsoever from TRSDOS.)

Lewin then introduced what Tom Robertson, Microsoft's general manager of interoperability and standards, referred to as the "four toolsets" in his interview with BetaNews two weeks ago, though for Lewin's retort, they're not referred to as such: The larger strategy, as laid out by Chairman Bill Gates in 2005, is "interoperability by design," which is broken down into four categories: by products, community, access, and standards.

Typically, standards is the stickler, as there continues to be some discussion among the community (to whom Lewin refers in item #2) as to whether Microsoft driving the standards process in many areas constitutes fair participation in the standards process. He mentioned the institutions of which Microsoft is a principal and participating member: IETF, W3C, OASIS, IEEE, ETSI, OMA, ECMA, ISO/IEC, and ITU.

But as a footnote, Lewin quoted a statement made two years ago (in a prepared Q&A) by platform strategy general manager Bill Hilf, in distinguishing between open standards and open source: "A key approach to bridging the interoperability divide at Microsoft is our strong support for open standards, as seen in our involvement in Web services, XML and SOAP," Hilf stated then. "It is these open standards - not open source - that help make today's integration technologies more interoperable than ever before."

"So Bruce, and I mean this in the nicest way," Lewin closed, "we're neighbors, worked together at Apple, and respect each other, but get the facts: We have supported cross-compatibility on the Macintosh for almost 30 years and we will continue to do so, and we strongly support interoperability with competitors and friends alike. When we do so, our customers win, the industry wins, we all win."

In another part of our interview with Tom Robertson, we asked him about one of the problems that crops up with respect to Microsoft's four-pronged approach to the topic: Doesn't interoperability mean different things to different people? "I think if you talk to 15 people and ask them for a definition of interoperability, you're going to come up with 15 definitions," Robertson told us.

"We've been talking to our customers and partners in the broader community," he continued, "and based on these discussions, we think interoperability means, taking steps to connect people, data, and diverse systems to allow the exchange of data across systems, and allow those systems to communicate. Our sense is that that's the right definition of interoperability, at least in the area where Microsoft is very active."

Robertson then cited a completely different four-pronged approach to interoperability: the European Interoperability Framework (PDF available here), whose final draft was produced in 2004 as a set of recommendations for the EU parliament. That paper quotes EC officials in 2002 as voicing similar confusion, stating the term means different things to different portions of its constituency.

In the end though, the paper recommends boiling it all down to one meaning only for the sake of simplicity: "In general terms interoperability describes the capability of two or more hardware devices or two or more software routines to work together. Specifically in connection with software, interoperability describes a feature of the software in the same way that functionality, ease of use, security, reliability are features."

Interestingly, that paper drew a similar distinction between open source and open standards to the one Lewin outlined in his blog post. Gently but firmly, the framework paper acknowledged the discussion about developers should have rights to the source code on which important standards are founded. But it then stated people tend to have these discussions once the scale and adoption of those standards has already broadened to the extent that the standard is worth discussing in the first place - implying that it isn't the open source process which drives any global standard.

"The key difference is that Open Standards retains the important commercial incentives to innovate by maintaining Intellectual Property rights," states the European Interoperability Framework. "Thus the question of Intellectual Property rights is also closely connected with the interoperability question."

"It is important to have a common understanding of interoperability," Microsoft's Tom Robertson told BetaNews. "But we have to appreciate that this is a fairly complex topic, and we need to focus on the things that matter most. Is it conceivable that we could come up with a common definition across all contexts? I don't know. I think it's worth discussing. And is it conceivable to have, in a sense, a report card or yardstick by which we measure levels of interoperability? Yea, maybe. I think that might be helpful to users.

"We are very sensitive to the views of those in the community, and there are many in the community who have an opinion on this," he continued. "I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that they're coming from different places, depending on who they are. If you're a user of IT and a deployer of IT, if you're in the government or in the private sector, you're going to have one set of perspectives. If you're a policy maker who's looking at the innovation in the marketplace, and the development of the information technology industry, you're going to have a different perspective. I don't mean to say that their views are wildly divergent in any way, but we do have to appreciate that they are coming from different places, and they are focused on different things."