Technics: MicroSoft's concession to Interoperability and its failure to provide in IE8

<>span style="font-weight:bold;">PressPass interviewed MS's Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Server and Tools Division, MicroSoft Corporation. "New Microsoft Interoperability Principles Ensure Open Connections and Promote Data Portability" Feb21,2k8.

Q&A: Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Server and Tools Division, discusses Microsoft’s new interoperability principles and the steps the company is taking to increase the openness of its products.

Asking the questions (only the first Q of the interview is included here) PressPass: Can you start by providing a high-level overview of today’s announcement?

Technotes, by Technowlb

Muglia: Sure. The announcement covers broad and important changes to our technology and business practices designed to increase the openness of our high-volume products to make it easier to develop highly-interoperable information systems. The changes are embodied in

Four interoperability principles to which we have committed [ourselves as a corporation].

First, to provide an open connection to our high-volume enterprise products;

second, promote data portability;

third, continue to enhance our support for industry standards;

and finally, to create more opportunities to strengthen dialogue and engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities.

Together, these principles significantly change the way we share information about our technologies and products. These changes help increase choice and opportunity for developers, partners, customers and competitors, which is one of our top long-term goals.

In this general context, IE Blog offers an extremely engaging article on IE Interoperability. Discussing "Quirks mode" and "Stamdards mode, this source offers a pithhy remark worthy of reflection: "Each version of each browser has its own Standards mode, because each version of each browser improves on its web standards support. There’s Safari 3’s Standards mode, Firefox 2’s Standards mode, IE6’s Standards mode, and IE7’s Standards mode, and they’re all different. We want to make IE8’s Standards mode much, much better than IE7’s Standards mode."

I finally found the actual webpage for MicroSoft's Interoperability Principles: Interoperability Principles -- Open Connections, Standards Support, Data Portability Published: February 21, 2008 | Updated: February 21, 2008a>.