Microsoft Reaches Interoperability 1.0

Today, Microsoft announced the release of more interoperability information, including legacy, Office binary file formats.

The updated protocol information is available here, on the MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network).

Microsoft also released final protocol information for 2007 versions of Exchange Server, Office 2007 and SharePoint Server. The information moves "from preliminary to 1.0 stage," Craig Shank, Microsoft's general manager of Interoperability, told me on Friday. "We're at a stage where we have a high degree of confidence in it."

Say what? How the hell do you have a 1.0 release of protocol information? So, what, the earlier release was beta? I didn't think of these questions until writing this post, otherwise I would have directly asked Craig last week. Because I wonder: How can somebody develop around protocols that are released but really are incomplete, let alone license them?

Microsoft released preliminary protocol information in April. The 1.0 designation reflects changes incorporated based on community feedback. I wonder how much feedback Microsoft got on licensing terms, which are unchanged.

The protocol information is free to use for non-commercial purposes. But people developing commercial products pay—and if not, their customers do. It's sensible that Microsoft charges for its patented technologies. But European Union sanctions demand free use of server protocol information for open source and free software, a concession Microsoft hasn't made. It's one I expect the company will never make.

"There isn't a cost to learning more," Craig said. "The documentation is posted to MSDN. Anyone can read anytime. Better yet there's a set of forums."

I probed Craig a bit about to see how far Microsoft would pursue non-paying commercial users. Microsoft gives away development tools to college students. What if someone develops an application that goes from free to commercial? I used example of a student charging others for a social networking app using Microsoft protocols. Craig emphasized the difference between a commercial enterprise and a student making "nickels for beer money. I'm not sure that's the most useful way to do the analysis."

Fair enough. Microsoft doesn't want to nickel and dime students out of their nickels and dimes.

Besides protocols for newer products, Microsoft also released information for Office binary file formats, such as .doc and .xls. Enterprises have mountains of valuable data locked away in these older formats. Their interoperability deserves consideration, too, and not just among Microsoft and third-party technologies. The protocols should allow enterprises to better extract meaningful data from older Microsoft file formats.

Microsoft also disclosed patent information. "It is patents that cover those protocols that we're publishing," Craig said. Because of licensing considerations, I asked if information included patents from other companies. "It is Microsoft patents," he affirmed.

Questions remain about Microsoft's interoperability sincerity, whether the company feels forced—by market conditions or European regulators—or has simply changed its ways.

"I would evaluate based on the documentation itself," Craig said. "I would suggest that a serious implentator would roll up his shelves and dive in."

Thoughtfully listening to his responses, I got to thinking about other companies' protocol information publishing. For all the criticism of Microsoft, I can't think of another high-tech company disclosing near as much information. So I asked Craig about other companies publishing protocol information.

"I would love to see others follow our leadership on this," he said.

Microsoft.com Goes Virtual

Now this is what corporate blogging is supposed to be about.

Today, Rob Emanuel, a Microsoft technology architect, blogged about Microsoft using Hyper-V technology for Microsoft.com. He earlier blogged—and much more briefly—about using Hyper-V Release Candidate 0 for the MSDN and TechNet sites.

Presumably, Rob's post supports today's Hyper-V release to manufacturing. I didn't see the blog post until this morning (it wasn't there at midnight Pacific time), even though it has a time stamp of 4:38 p.m. PDT yesterday. I assume that Rob simply forgot to update. Too many pesky blogging systems label time when a post is created, forcing the blogger to manually update time and date later on.

I love it when Microsoft employee bloggers describe how the company's dog food is caviar—and that's meant as a compliment, by the way. Microsoft is quick to use its own technology, but it's not as fast telling other people about it. That's changing, and Rob's post is indicative of the trend. The best Microsoft case study is Microsoft.

Rob has put together a nice, concise primer, including Microsoft.com site stats and deployed hardware. Companies like Microsoft don't easily disclose this kind of information. There are competitive and even security considerations, which make the post's existence that much more impressive.

As of today, Microsoft has "25 percent of production traffic" running on Hyper-V, Rob blogged. "Based on these results we are ready to fully host www.microsoft.com web servers on Hyper-V and we're targeting end of June for 50 percent of the load. As soon as we complete deployment of our new hardware infrastructure in diverse data centers, we'll complete the full virtualization."

I don't want to excerpt too much from the post, but these statistics are worth calling out: Microsoft.com "handles 15,000 requests per second, 1.2 billion page views per month, and 280M worldwide unique users per month as well as supporting ~5000 content contributors from within the company," Rob blogged. "This site has close to 300GB of content consisting of some seven million individual files on each server."

Microsoft transparency is best when the company opens up the soul of its own IT operations. No case study is better than Microsoft.