Contrary to what Bruce Chizen, Adobe CEO, has said about our lack of intention to maintain a cross-platform solution, we have historically demonstrated a market-driven pursuit of interoperability on behalf of our customers. That won’t change, hasn’t changed. Cross-platform support is a small part of our overall interop commitment, and we have a strong commitment to both. We think it’s an important point because our support for real interoperability affects the ability of our customers to drive value from their IT investments and affects the ability of our ISV partners — large and small — to provide solutions that work in the heterogeneous world in which we live and work. We get that. We want to reach out to the broadest audience, and that means going where the audience is — on our platform, yes absolutely, and on others.

A few stats on our cross-platform commitment, which goes way back:

So you see, Macintosh cross-platform support is a key commitment and part of our strategy, but our overall interoperability commitment goes much, much deeper. Think Java, Linux, Open Source, IP access, open standards, and more.

The Larger Strategy — Interoperability by Design

Bill Gates introduced this concept more than two years ago. It is based on our industry leadership in expanding the use of XML and delivering technology that empowers customers by working with the applications and solutions they already have in place. Over the past year, we have broadened our investments in interoperability and collaborated with both partner and competitive software and hardware companies — particularly where improving interoperability for shared customers benefit all parties. And we named a new corporate champion to spearhead our interoperability efforts – Bob Muglia, our SVP of Servers and Tools.

Why are we doing all of this and why does it matter? It matters to our customers — and matters a lot. They have always worked in heterogeneous IT environments and require greater levels of interoperability from their IT vendors. As a technology leader, it is our responsibility to support interoperability — in a way that promotes innovation and the development of the software industry as a whole.

We design our products to work well with others out the box, to not require expensive and complicated consulting and integration engagements to work, and we’re building bridges to competitors and partners alike to foster competition and coexistence across innovative solutions.

In fact, we deliver interoperability by design in four important ways: through our products, collaborations with the community, access to our technology, and industry standards.

Interoperability by Products:

Microsoft’s products connect and exchange data with software and hardware from more than 100,000 other companies. There are more than 25,000 configurations of PCs that work with Windows out of the box. Our technology enables translation between diverse systems through the use of protocols and data formats based upon XML. An important recent example is Silverlight, our cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of Microsoft .NET–based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. It offers consistent experiences between the Windows-based and Macintosh computers without any additional installation requirements.

Our chief software architect Ray Ozzie has said that “when you are developing for the universal Web (browsers for a range of devices) you can’t think about what platform the user is running on — it could be a phone, a PlayStation portable — do they have a browser on that? The guidance I give our development team is to look at where the audience is, and prioritize development for Silverlight based on that, we’re investing that way.”

We’ve made significant progress on interoperability with Linux/OSS vendors, including technical collaboration agreements with three of the leading open source software businesses — Novell, JBoss (now part of RedHat) and SugarCRM.

In fact, to achieve interoperability by products, and in particular to achieve this interoperability between products from Ajax technology vendors, we entered into a highly collaborative effort — OpenAjax Alliance. Comprised of nearly 90 companies, it hopes to accelerate success with Ajax and drive the future of the Ajax ecosystem.

Interoperability by Community:

We’re building technology and business bridges to partners and competitors to increase ROI for our customers. We’ve led and continue to support the goals of the Interop Vendor Alliance (IVA), a cross-industry group of global software and hardware vendors and other organizations that work together to enhance interoperability with Microsoft systems on behalf of their customers. With 20 founding members of the alliance, including Sun, and more than 40 members today, the IVA is further evidence of our long-term investment in improving interoperability between heterogeneous systems. Listen to Greg Papadopoulos, CTO and EVP of Research and Development at Sun, talk about the importance of Microsoft and Sun solving interoperability problems on behalf of customers.

We’re also listening intently to what customers are saying about key interoperability scenarios. Through the Interoperability Executive Customer Council (IECC), formed in June 2006, we’re identifying areas for improved interoperability across our products and the software industry. Last October we hosted IECC in Redmond where we met with founding member CIO/CTO’s from Societe Generale, LexisNexis, Kohl’s Department Store, Denmark’s Ministry of Finance, and many others to get feedback on the pressing areas of technical and business interoperability. In May of this year we had our second full member meeting.

Just recently, Microsoft’s Jean Paoli, XML co-creator, told me that based on our review, we believe that we’ve addressed and made progress on approximately 70 percent of the interoperability concerns that were raised in the first six months. We are working with the council members’ architects and CIOs to review the final status of each issue to confirm. We particularly value working with our customers on identifying issues and providing solutions and we urge people, as I said in the headline of this column, to work with us and ‘get the facts’. Of course, we need to do a better job of communicating them as well. Jean and Tom Robertson head our interop programs.

Here’s our commitment to some other important platforms and communities:

Java — We’ve supported cross-platform compatibility between Java and .NET for several years — and broader interoperability with Java was first supported through COM, via third-party vendors. With the release of Microsoft .NET 1.0 in 2001, we introduced Web Services, which from then on became the main way we’ve supported interoperability between the two platforms. In fact, Microsoft and other vendors (Sun, BEA and IBM) are also part of the Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I). Given the high concentration of both Java and Microsoft .NET developers worldwide, we launched Resources for Java Developers and more recently, Project Tango, a joint Microsoft/Sun cross-company collaboration that will ensure strong Web Services interoperability between the two platforms.

Linux and Open Source — In 2005 at LinuxWorld, we announced the formation of the Linux/Open Source Software Lab on our Redmond Campus. By running Linux and a variety of other OSS in a highly Microsoft-centric IT environment, we’re learning how those technologies can better interoperate with Microsoft’s technologies and vice versa. Visit our community website, Port 25.

In November last year, we announced what we think is a historic bridging of the divide between open source and proprietary software. We have signed three agreements with Novell that, taken together, will greatly enhance interoperability between Linux and Windows® and give customers greater flexibility in their IT environments. We’re also planning to open a joint interoperability lab that focuses on interoperable virtualization between the Windows and the SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server).

In early June, we announced a broad collaboration agreement with Linux platform provider Xandros, Inc. and collaboration with Linux desktop provider Linspire. Both extend a bridge between open source and commercial software and deliver customers real value in mixed systems environments.

SecureIT Alliance — Formed in 2006, its mission is to develop, enhance and promote applications that interoperate with the Microsoft platform, providing informational resources for security technology professionals. We now have more than 100 members, including Symantec Corp., McAfee Inc, Trend Micro and VeriSign as well as innovative startups such as Avoco Secure, Centrify, and e-Security.

OpenID —With this universal online identity, we’re working with the industry to enable interoperability between discrete systems — what we call ‘anywhere access.’

Interoperability by Access:

By offering to make our technology and IP available for use by others, Microsoft opens the door for greater innovation and a more competitive market. In addition to making source code available in many cases, Microsoft makes patent rights available to others to develop their own implementations of key technologies such as Web services, ECMA, OpenXML, Virtual Hard Disk, Sender ID and others via the Open Specification Promise.

As an example, we’ve designed interoperability software in Virtual Server 2005 R2 to support Linux guest operating systems and the royalty-free licensing of the Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) format to more than 45 vendors such as Akimbi, Brocade, Diskeeper, Fujitsu-Siemens, Network Appliance, Platespin, Softricity, Virtual Iron, and XenSource.

We’ve also licensed our IP to such companies as TurboLinux, and have inked collaborative agreements with SAP and Hyperion as well. In early June we inked a cross-license patent agreement with South Korea’s LG Electronics. Under terms of the deal, LG will be able to use Microsoft-patented technology in its products, including Linux-based embedded devices. And we get access to LG’s patents and will license other ones developed by LG, now owned by MicroConnect Group.

We have also licensed our IP to XenSource, and ventured into IP licensing agreements with Nokia, Symbian, SAP, NEC, Toshiba, Sony, Erickson, and Autodesk.

Interoperability by Standards:

Standards are one way of many that the software industry uses to foster a competitive marketplace. Even more than that, standards help establish a common ground for everyone to use — they simply make things work better together. We are working with many formal and informal standards efforts, including organizations such as IETF, W3C, OASIS, IEEE, ETSI, OMA, ECMA, ISO/IEC (JTC1) and ITU.

We continue to participate in, and support industry standards for improved data exchange and application integration in technologies such as web services, financial and business transactions (EDI and RFID support in Vista), speech-enabled applications and websites (SALT in Speech Server 2007), and Web content (XHTML 1.0 support in Office 2007).

Other examples of our standards support include:

A Word about Open Standards vs. Open Source

It’s worth noting, as Bill Hilf, General Manager, Platform Strategy, says, that interoperability is not a new focus for Microsoft. “We have been enabling interoperability via Host Integration Server and Services for UNIX for some time. A key approach to bridging the interoperability divide at Microsoft is our strong support for open standards, as seen in our involvement in Web services, XML and SOAP. It is these open standards – not open source – that help make today’s integration technologies more interoperable than ever before. We believe that incumbent vendors like Microsoft and vendors with emerging platforms need to share the responsibility of bridging the interoperability gaps and working together to meet customer satisfaction.”

So given all of what I’ve said above, we think the evidence is already in. We’re committed to coexistence and interoperability. Cross-platform, yes, but it’s part of our bigger story on interoperability. So Bruce, and I mean this in the nicest way, we’re neighbors, worked together at Apple, and respect each other, but get the facts: we have supported cross-compatibility on the Macintosh for almost 30 years and we will continue to do so, and we strongly support interoperability with competitors and friends alike. When we do so, our customers win, the industry wins, we all win.