The title of my blog post is the same as a article from Darryl Taft at eweek. In the article (in the form of a slideshow) we see a list of people, products, and technologies that make Microsoft important to the developer. I agree with all of them. Things like having Bill Gates and Steve Balmer support developers, tools like Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, and technologies like web services and AJAX really do provide a lot of compelling reasons to want to develop on the Microsoft platform.

I also feel from a historical sense that the reason not to develop on the Microsoft platform has some merit. In the past Microsoft has not shown a great commitment to supporting many different platforms. Some of the reason is competitive and others are economical. To be certain, Microsoft is not unique in this as other companies have removed support for an OS or CPU architecture and not been branded as being untrustworthy, but for some reason if Microsoft stops supporting RISC chips it is to help Intel and not because there are fewer and fewer RISC machines being sold. I see that attitude changing now. The change is slow in some areas (I don’t expect to see Windows open sourced any time soon) but in others like the web where you can get the source code for some of the offerings there is a strong commitment to allow customers to use the products regardless of the support provided by Microsoft.

Another area is in interoperability. As part of the work I am doing now I have been asked by Microsoft to go back and update a slide deck to point out the different places where Microsoft is able to interoperate with other platforms. I also am volunteering time with the Apache Stonehenge project. The goal of the project is to show WS-* interoperability between different web service stacks. We have just completed voting on the M1 release and are discussing M2. There is a lot of excitement and energy on making sure that there is interoperability and that anyone can download the code and see the interoperability happening. There are other areas like information cards and the work being done around identity where making sure that interoperability happens because without interoperability it doesn’t do any good for anyone.

Microsoft has done a lot better at working with standards bodies and making sure that they are implementing standards as they are developed without proprietary extensions to the standards. Microsoft has a touch position in that they want to innovate and be able to compete in the marketplace but at the same time they need to support standards and be the same as everyone else so their products can be used. I think in the end having all products be open source is not the ultimate answer but having some examples of how to interoperate will go a long way to making sure that everything works well together.