Published: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:19:16 +0000 
This is real Interoperability
- Technical specifications for global interoperability and freedom
- Interoperate through standards
- Software product is less important
- Switch products and keep access
Microsoft started their so called “interoperability” initiative. With a deeper look we find that the main objective of the released specifications is to let developers interact with their products only, something I like to call Intra-operability.
This is Intraoperability
- Technical specifications for interaction with and favor the product
- Interoperate through the product
- Software product is the main player
- Switch product and loose access
See the difference?
Microsoft technical specifications have serious technical and legal issues, and are being released not to increase interoperability across people, organizations and applications, but to leverage the use of their products. For the standard document format scenario: OOXML is about allowing other people to interact with files that are primarily generated and manipulated with Microsoft Office. It is not about full interoperability, which would enable competition with Microsoft Office, for obvious reason.
For each purpose or scope, better open standards exist and should be adopted and used instead: Java versus .NET, XHTML versus IE-campatible-only DHTML, ODF versus OOXML, etc
My friend Cezar Taurion has also written some words about Intra-operability (in portuguese). Bob Sutor also put together some words about it.
These graphics are available in a friendly Creative Commons license, in this animated ODF file, in case you want to integrate them in your presentations. PDF export also available.
Avi on 
Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:19:16 +0000 | Tags: 
hCard/vCard
[...] do meu colega Roberto Salomon sobre a famosa estratégia adotar-estender-extinguir que a Microsoft já demonstrou ser adepta. Lembrem-se do LDAP+Kerberos ► AD, Java Virtual Machine ► MS Virtual Machine e Padrões W3C ► [...]
[...] As “minas terrestres de patentes“, as várias contradições não explicadas, e a confusão entre inter e intraoperabilidade, o fato de um produto não estar sendo usado apenas de formato referência, mas como fundamento [...]
Muito boa a explicação, você foi direto ao âmago da questão e mostrou de uma forma simples o tipo de comprometimento da MS com os padrões abertos. Parabéns!
“Something wicked this way comes…”…
…
Very cool slides, Avi. You hit where really is important.
PS: Please, Avi, activate trackback so we could credit your blog correctly.
[...] por Avi Alkalay (avixΘbr·ibm·com) – referência [...]
Troll, no problem. It is good, desired and welcome to have market leader open the specs on how to interact with its product.
And there is also no problem to transform these specs into ISO standards, unless other similar standards already exist, or the spec doesn’t have a standards-grade quality.
OOXML perfectly fits in this description, so for now, whenever Microsoft says OOXML promotes interoperability, read as intra-operability.
… kind of “embrace and extend” (and extinguish). A new approach.
You hit the nail. However Intra-operability imho is not in this particular case that bad. MSO2007+’s usability and features are quite superior to the open source alternatives so many people gladly use what they offer.