it's everybody's business to play well with others. Really?

Submitted by rich_c on February 21, 2009 - 12:51pm

What on earth is going on with Microsoft lately? I saw an advert on TV the other day (And again today.) all about open something or other which turned out to be a MS campaign. Also we hear Steve Ballmer’s been asking Apple to be more open which granted, they need to be but pot, kettle etc? The television advert I refer to turns out to be their People Ready business campaign. I won’t provide a link, but you can easily Google it. On top of that, deals have been done with Red Hat so that virtualisation of each other’s OSes is supported. All very caring and sharing…

My puzzlement comes from the fact that a couple of weeks ago, anyone would have had no difficulty in stating that Microsoft was the polar opposite of ‘openness’ as readers of this blog will understand it. I can only hope that there is a genuine element to all this and it’s not just some underhand “embrace, extend and extinguish” exercise. Maybe they’ll open up enough to publicly clarify what would seem to be a change in attitude to the concept of openness. (The cynical among us might suppose it's to gain a bit of favour with the next European court hearing they're asked to attend...)

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