Bill Gates on Interoperability

In an e-mail to customers yesterday, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect describes the company's work to ensure that its software works well across heterogeneous IT environments through interoperability and also makes an attack on open source software.

"Microsoft’s interoperability investments to date have yielded significant benefits to customers and the industry". "And we are well aware that we can do even more to help customers and partners achieve greater interoperability to meet their business needs", Gates said. "The foundation we are building with XML is already yielding significant reductions in the time, skill and cost required to integrate systems".

Lets look at some of Microsoft's biggest interoperability challenges. Microsoft deliberately modified Windows 3.1 code so that it would not run on top of DR-DOS. Microsoft refused to ship Java with Windows until Sun brought Microsoft to court. The list goes on and on (Netscape, Real Networks, etc). Who knows what else they slip into Service Packs. Microsoft is only now talking of interoperability due to the U.S antitrust case, the EU antitrust ruling, and XML. Huh? XML? Yeah, XML. XML is the future, and Microsoft knows it. From IBM big iron down to your cell phone, XML will flow through it along the way. Bottom line is that Microsoft's interoperability investments to date have been a burden on the U.S. taxpayer and the world legal system. The only benefit has been a nice income for practitioner's of law.

"Sometimes interoperability is also confused with open source software". "Interoperability is about how different software systems work together". "Open source is a methodology for licensing and/or developing software – that may or may not be interoperable" said Gates. "Additionally, the open source development approach encourages the creation of many permutations of the same type of software application, which could add implementation and testing overhead to interoperability efforts."

Bill Gates is wrong here. Most open source software goes hand in hand with interoperability. Why? Open source software is usually written to open industry standards with the GPL. You don't have to buy an expensive license or sign an NDA to get the specifications to be interoperable. There are no restrictions or barriers to entry, except for whats contained in the GPL. Bill's open source statement is just more rhetoric and FUD.

Microsoft is playing catch up with the industry. The industry is tired of bug infested, high cost, security risked proprietary software (Windows and .NET platform). The XML standard is providing the interoperability, not Microsoft.

Additional Information:

Executive E-mail -- Bill Gates

Microsoft Office System Developer Conference -- Speech transcript of Bill Gates

Microsoft PressPass -- Press releases and other MS news

www.xml.org -- Industry web portal

About XML -- World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)