Subscribe
RSS news feed
Add to Technorati FavoritesRecent Posts
- 21st Century Business Architecture?
- Enterprise SOA without Enterprise Architecture – hunting for treasure without a map?: Guest blogger - Jonathan Ebsworth
- It's okay Cyber Storm II has passed
- The Index of Convergence - Chris Yapp
- Are eBay – changing their game?
- What is the definition of Middleware these days?
- Extract, Transform and Load – now available for MashUps
- My Laptop, Your Laptop
- Exit Yahoo – an early end to technology innovation?
- Blogging is maturing and that means changing
Navigate
Search the blog
« Mashup Programmer loves Bastard Pop | Main | From Medieval to Pre-Fab Software »
The EU versus Microsoft; openness or interoperability?
The fact that you can read this at all is down to the understanding that standards matter. To you, and I, as users the benefit in being able to use as wide a range of ‘something’, due to standards allowing interoperability seems obvious. It’s a more complicated situation for a vender, and in particular, for a technology vendor. If you spend the R&D dollars to get a product to market first, then its an economic necessity to recover your costs by exploiting your ‘niche’ as long as possible, opening up and sharing the market with others through standards is most likely not good news. Think Apple and i Tunes, rather than MP3.
So far so good, but now I am going make a statement that goes against popular views, about Microsoft. I am about to suggest that we need to be asking a few more questions about the simple assertion by the European Union that Microsoft is bad for not opening up its products. So bad in fact that it needs to be punished by removing millions of euros through fines, which will provide the European Union with a handy boost to their permanently empty bank account, and, remove from useful circulation the money that could help rectify the situation. The point I want to make is not about Microsoft, right now they the example, but about the case that has produced a principle of law that could be applied to others.
Microsoft’s problem put simply is; here we all are, or at least most of us, happily using Microsoft technology to read this blog, by using ‘standards’, whilst simultaneously Microsoft is being fined hundreds of millions of Euros by the European Union for not opening up its proprietary products. Is this the same thing as standards compliance, or a different case, and one that might hit more widely as we adopt ‘API’ based integration for SOA? It’s this last aspect that has made me decide to blog on this topic.
By the rules of economists if we don’t like the Microsoft behaviour then we should stop buying their products until they change their behaviour. Clearly this hasn’t happen, in fact Microsoft market shares in areas such as server operating systems continues to grow, true there has been some share taken back in certain areas. Overall we seem to be showing our approval by continuing to buy, even while apparently saying they should change, and open up their products. So on the face of it we, the consumers, seem to think the upside of a cohesive software suite built at the cost of hundreds of millions in reducing complexity in installation, and risk of integration risk is a good thing.
Funnily enough it’s the Governments of the world who seem to be those who are not satisfied, look what has happened with document formats. France, Belgium and Denmark Governments have all decreed that open standard formats for documents are mandatory; there are similar moves at city or state levels elsewhere, so Microsoft has decided to support the OpenDocument format at the expense of its own OpenXML standard. Perfect! The market mechanism works!
But why did it happen? A cynic might suggest that it avoided governments having to spend money to update formats, but it’s actually due to the right conclusion, the same one that lets you read this blog, i.e. interoperability standards are a good and useful attribute. That’s not actually quite the same thing as the EU is asking from Microsoft which amounts to a full scale compliance with opening up the entire code base suggests, that’s nothing to do with ‘standards’ in spite of some of the claims made in the supporting case notes. Interoperability through well published interfaces is what is required by the majority of users, and yes these should be to globally agreed and accepted standards. Users accept, and want, to have the use of the full extensive, complex Microsoft proprietary operating system with its unique features, but as Microsoft has increasingly accepts, they also want to be able to use any content from any source.
Why have I drawn attention to this whole area? Well, it’s all about the increasing moves towards ‘Services’ built on the principle of declared interfaces for integration. There is a strong emphasis on ‘standards’ in this, and yet already a new generation of Middleware which is proprietary has appeared. Will the EU decide that Middleware vendors must ‘open up’ to help their competitors too? It’s not that far away in principle from the argument that the EU has now enshrined in law with their position on Microsoft. In defence of the EU action on Microsoft you can argue quite that it started before most of the current wave had really started, or Microsoft had felt threaten by other forms of competitor, etc, but nevertheless its now an enshrined principle of case law.
Does the EU believe that we need everything to be ‘standardised’, the words used to describe the requirement for Microsoft to ‘document their standard interfaces’, and how deep, or into how many granular pieces does this requirement apply? Will we continue to think that the proprietary middleware with unique properties is a better environment even if at this level it is non standardised?
The more you think about it there are some interesting moments ahead in middleware and standards, and some very real challenges that could see Middleware suppliers moving from being the good guys that connect to the bad guys who should open up their entire product code!
Posted by Andy Mulholland on August 28, 2006 | 
Digg this | 
Seed Newsvine
TrackBacks
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.capgemini.com/cgi-bin/blog/mt-tb.cgi/47
Comments
# on August 28, 2006 1:04 PM, Joost van der Waa said:
Andy,
I don't think the EU's goal is to open up the entire source code of Microsofts products. It is all about monopolies and misusing that position. I don't think I have help you to remind the way Microsoft got rid of Netscape...
And yes, standards are a good thing, it will help you to work together in a better - and possibly cheaper - way.
So, comply to standards, wether that will be ODF (not yet supported by MS) or OpenXML (still MS' own format, despite the fact that they have made it public).
Joost
p.s. it is not by Microsofts efforts that we can read this blog.
# on August 28, 2006 7:44 PM, Brian said:
Ahhh, a good old Microsoft debate - don't we just love it!
In all seriousness it does epitomise so many paradoxes, so many yins and the yangs of capitalism and monopolisation embodied in a single organisation. As such it presents an excellent field for discussion on a variety of subject areas, this being perhaps on the finest. In effect, support for commercial growth versus social governance and freedom of choice.
I guess one of the points being made here concerns the difference between 'Openness' and 'Interoperability'. There is quite a subtle but crucial distinction, concerning either socialising your APIs and transparently inviting third parties to use them, or internally designing what you to work with what and under which conditions/standards - in effect a balance between the push and the pull, between industry-led governance and vendor-led specialism/leadership.
Even after several industrial revolutions, it is not yet clear how a desire to create and grow a marketplace best aligns itself with social evolution? After all, Porter’s five forces can be seen as a simplified reflection of those within evolutionary biology – which so many of the more deeply thought-out business models are recognising as a significant philosophy. The gap in this thinking concerns the control centre; a marketplace without a balance in control between major corporations and (industrial or national) governance is frequently shown as a flawed one. This is, I believe, the crux of the issue - Microsoft, in trying to strengthen market dominance, versus the EU, in attempting to keep alternative options open for all and counter the monopoly (i.e. maintain the ecosystem).
An important realisation here is, I believe, that the traditional 'rules of the economists' fall down in this example, and in others, because the consumer does not have realistic freedom of choice. The pressure to conform with the majority has gone beyond the point of fashion consciousness and is a question of practicality and effectiveness. Hence why we are seeing the pressures being exerted at a governmental level, rather than through the open marketplace ... Perhaps raising the broader question - can an ecosystem be forcibly re-balanced?
Come the emergence of mature players from the 'new-wave' Middleware market it will be interesting to see how many recognise the benefits from early investment in providing appropriate 'Openness' in their APIs and ensuring ease of 'Interoperability' with fellow emergent, as well as established, technologies. Conversely, it will be equally inspiring to see how much these comprise the thought-leaders and pioneers. Even more so, it will be very encouraging to see a more naturally balanced, industry-led approach emerge rather than yet more government versus monopoly player battles.
# on August 29, 2006 1:21 PM, andy mulholland said:
ah!! thought that would get the comments rolling. actually i agree that i don't think that the EU's goal was to open the source code. I just think that these things are vitally important, very complicated and highly risky in terms of outcomes when well meaning regulation is enacted and leaves others to think of using the precidence in a way that was not foreseen.
andy
# on September 19, 2006 10:15 PM, Huygens said:
Interesting article but lacking one aspect, and an important one. What is referred as "standard" in this article is not quite true.
For example, there is an HTML/CSS standard (OK it is just recommandations, but still it ought to be recognise as a de-facto standard), and obviously in many ways, Microsoft Internet Explorer (the today stable version) does not properly implement it.
Another example? File sharing, Microsoft had a SMB protocol which was never shared with anyone. Samba Open Source group has been reverse engineering Microsoft protocol to be able to interoperate with it. Now, Microsoft moved to CIFS, it was the same problem for the Samba team. Funnily, Mac and Linux are using Samba, and it works better (easier for a user) than Microsoft own implementation!!!
Another one? Java! Yep, Microsoft had tried to incorporate Java, then modify it so it would be incompatible with the standard Java. SUN sued them and won. Microsoft simply removed Java from its OS and created C#! Nice interoperability!!!
Shall I continue?
Maybe not :) OK as you guessed, this comment was written from a Linux PC using Firefox! ;) No Microsoft software on this computer...
# on September 20, 2006 11:45 AM, andy mulholland said:
yes! the interesting point as to 'what is a standard?' comes up, shortly followed by comments on 'its not a standard because microsoft, or xyz corporation, says it is a standard. you are of course right and my comment treated the word standard in a loose way. I am still concerned about the principle of how far we go in the direction of ledgislation controlling what is 'opened'
andy
# on November 8, 2007 9:22 PM, andy mulholland said:
just wanted to update this with an interesting statistic. this was posted as part of the comments on the settlement of this case. seems only 1700 odd sales have occured of the unbundled version over the last year - seems to prove my point that the users were not the interested or hurt party in this debate