Can Microsoft, the fiercest predator in the software jungle, really change its spots? That was the question left open Thursday after the company laid out what it claimed was a significant adjustment to its technology strategy.
Certainly, regulators and competitors who have tangled with Microsoft over the years sounded far from convinced.
"We have heard high-profile commitments from Microsoft a half-dozen times over the past two years, but have yet to see any lasting change in Microsoft's behaviour in the marketplace," said Thomas Vinje, legal counsel to the European Committee for Interoperability Systems, a body which includes IBM, Oracle, Sun Microsystems and Adobe.
At issue is whether the company is sincere when it says that it will open up some of its software to make it easier for other companies' technology to interoperate, or work seamlessly with, its own.
That was one of the issues at the heart of the long-running European case against Microsoft, which forced the company to make the communications protocols on some of its servers more freely available.
Sceptics point to that battle, as well as accusations of foot-dragging to implement a similar requirement made by US regulators more than five years ago, as evidence that Microsoft has yet to get serious about true openness.
To support its latest claim, the software group made four promises: that it would create "open connections" to its most highly-used products, make it easier for customers to move their data out of Microsoft software, act more transparently over its adoption of industry standards, and build better relations with others in the software industry.
These broad commitments point to a range of issues that have bedevilled Microsoft's relations with many others in the technology industry in the years that it has reined supreme.
For instance, its "embrace and extend" approach to industry standards has long been one off its most controversial technology tactics. By taking a commonly used standard, then adding its own "extensions", or additional features, Microsoft has frequently been criticised of trying to undermine standards and impose its own proprietary versions in their place.
In another heated case, Microsoft has so far failed to have the new document formats contained in the latest version of its Office applications declared an industry standard, a designation it needs to convince governments and others to store their data in the formats.
Critics claim that Microsoft's technology does not meet the requirements of a true standard. Microsoft's appeal of the earlier rejection is due to be heard shortly.
In a gesture to its opponents, Microsoft said Thursday that it would let outside developers add whatever document formats they like to the Office suite of applications, and set them as the defaults.
In the biggest part of its new openness initiative, Microsoft said it would freely publish two types of technology that it had generally kept more guarded, at least for its most heavily-used products: its applications programming interfaces, which act as the "hooks" that other developers use to write software that runs on its platforms, and the communications protocols needed for different products to interoperate seamlessly.
Yet according to the critics, it will be some time before the real impact of these moves can be assessed.
"Today's (Thursday) announcement is still all about the rest of the world interoperating with Microsoft on Microsoft's own terms, not the other way round," ECIS said. "So long as that is the strategic orientation, the interoperability devil will always be in the technical and commercial details."
