Microsoft trying to live up to interop pledge

Microsoft on Monday announced a series of moves that it says back up its February pledge to make it easy for others' software to interoperate with its own products.

The news is mostly incremental. Microsoft is making more documentation available on how its older binary Office formats work as well as a final version of the protocols used in Office 2007. What caught my eye, though, were two new projects.

The first involves Microsoft working with China's Beihang University to develop translators to allow Excel and PowerPoint to open and save files in China's UOF format. In the second, Microsoft is working to design a new translator that converts its Office 2007 documents into HTML to allow software makers to more easily create browser-based applications that can read Office 2007's Open XML Office format.

"Customers want the interoperability at the document level," Craig Shank, general manager of interoperability at Microsoft. "They would like to be able to use documents in different ways."

[lmasanti]

quote:
"Microsoft trying to live up to interop pledge"

Is MS "trying" or is it being forced to comply with the DOJ agreements?
AFAIK, MS is delaying everything up to July 2009 --or something like that-- when the agreement ends.

[The_Decider]

If MS were the competent company some misguided people think they are, this documentation would have been written long ago, even if it were for internal use. It is amazing how small the code to doc ratio is at Microsith.

[kojacked]

If I were MS I would just open source all products and become a non-profit. Even then trolls will continue to hate MS but at least they'll haven given them what they wanted.

[orcmid]

@Imasanti: The July 2009 date is for a set of system overview documents that are in addition to the specifications already released and the updates released today (making 50,000 pages already available so far). While the current compliance-oversight activity is scheduled to expire in November 2009, it can be extended as far as November 2012 and Microsoft has said it would not object to extensions.

@The_Decider Yes, it is amazing and retroactive documentation is hard. But they are slogging it out:
http://orcmid.com/blog/2008/06/interoperability-by-regulation-glass.asp