Last night, I had dinner in Palo Alto with Microsoft's general managers in charge of interoperability: Tom Robertson and frenchman Jean Paoli (pictured). They wanted to discuss what Microsoft has accomplished in the interoperability space over the past year, including the Open Document format/Open XML Translator project in July, the open specification promise, the creation of the Customer Council for Interoperability and the Interopability Vendor Alliance, culminating with the partnership between Microsoft and Novell in November. While Tom (a former general counsel) is the standards/policy guru, Jean (co-founder of the XML standard) is more technical. Both reports to senior vice president of the Server and Tools Business Bob Muglia and are in charge of the new "cross-company" organisation focused entirely on pushing, internally and externally, interoperability standards.

A year and a half ago, we recognised that we needed a more systematic approach to interoperability that spans the product groups and that would take a systematic approach to solve these problems, says Paoli

Personally, I'm surprised it took Microsoft so long to come to the realisation that even the largest software maker in the world has to work with others. Here are some "interesting" quotes taken from our conversation:

For the first time we have a structured way to talk with our customers and other vendors about interoperability

and,

Vendors have a responsibility to work together and by themselves build bridges between technologies

more,

Interoperability is a key part of the marketplace, a key part of doing business

regarding open source,

Our work with Novell is a model for how a bridge can be created between the open source world and the commercial software world through technical collaboration, patent agreement and marketing

on what's next,

We've identified 4 areas that our customers would like us to focus our interoperability efforts: identity, system management, how you build applications (web services) and collaboration for the end user, the information workers

So, no more undocumented Windows APIs and forget about the "embrace and extend" strategy, an euphemism for taking over a competitor's technology and re-arranging it to the point that it is incompatible with anything but Microsoft's own "broken" implementation. Famous examples of the "embrace and extend" strategy include Java and the Kerberos secure protocols. Well... that's what Robertson and Paoli promised. However, haven't lived through more than a decade of Redmond's aggressive tactics leaves me a bit skeptical (understated) of Microsoft's "goodwill". Time will tell of course. But we'll be able to witness first hand Microsoft new "friendliness" with shipping products. Windows Vista and Office 2007 being the first.