Microsoft starts to open up

Microsoft and Sun put on a nice show recently to demonstrate that competitors can still work together to improve interoperability for the benefit of their customers, this follows a couple of years of real progress by Microsoft in working out (with partners and competitors again) an architectural approach (web services) that allows them to innovate but inter-operate.  Of course the Open Source world has been showing the way on that for years, so its nothing new, but it’s certainly an encouraging move by Microsoft.  This last report on their approaches to Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik and more recently Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and vice president of open-source affairs at Red Hat is further evidence.  Certainly in my discussions with Microsoft I am detecting an increasing awareness of the real world that customers live in,  rather than the ideal world (in their eyes) that Microsoft would like us to be in, progress, slow but sure.