Think about all the things that Wall Street has said Microsoft should do over the past decade. None of them was "more open source."
All the groundwork was done by Ballmer. It had to be because now that he and Gates have reduced their ownership stake and are no longer the two largest shareholders, Wall Street's flavor of the month ideas cannot be ignored.
The 'new' Microsoft has been building at least since they hired Hanselman back around 2008. He was talking then on his podcast about taking the job to advocate open source. Even then Microsoft worked with the Mono team. They moved Office to an open file format.
It takes a long time to change an aircraft carrier's course. This is Ballmer's strategic vision. His passion for developers even made it onto Youtube.
Or rather: When OpenDocument was standardized by ISO and threatened to create demand for open, common, standardized interchange formats, they created a similarly and confusingly named XML version of their existing format, with insufficient documentation to allow complete third-party implementations, and pushed it as a competing ISO standard, using tricks such as (accidentally, I believe they said) encouraging partner companies to join standards bodies just for the vote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Standards_Institute#The...
That may have been true at the time, but the documentation for OpenXML is actually very good. It's incredibly detailed -- I think the standard is somewhere around 5000 pages, and fairly readable. Of course, I haven't ever actually had to write my own implementation (thank god).
That's the way standards work. OpenDocument did not meet MicroSoft's needs. They were the one with a massive investment in an existing code base and customers who would be best served by feature compatibility. So they used the same process to create something with equal legitimacy.
As Grace Hopper said, the great thing about standards is there a are so many to choose from.
All the groundwork was done by Ballmer. It had to be because now that he and Gates have reduced their ownership stake and are no longer the two largest shareholders, Wall Street's flavor of the month ideas cannot be ignored.
The 'new' Microsoft has been building at least since they hired Hanselman back around 2008. He was talking then on his podcast about taking the job to advocate open source. Even then Microsoft worked with the Mono team. They moved Office to an open file format.
It takes a long time to change an aircraft carrier's course. This is Ballmer's strategic vision. His passion for developers even made it onto Youtube.