One of the ways that Microsoft hopes to break into Cloud Computing beyond leveraging its Leviathan Presence on the Desktop is through a quiet but ever more broad Interoperability campaign. Witness:
1)Several agreements with Sun over Java and other software co-operation – here is the latest;
2)IBM and MS are doing selective agreements like content management or unified communication;
3)Zend is having Microsoft Interpoperability conferences;
And so on – just search for Interoperability on the Microsoft site.
But from time to time one gets the idea that this is just Window’s Dressing – Redmond is still hacking to make competitive software not on equal stature in Windows – as the following screen shot shows:
This is a screenshot of a search done in Windows XP with Service Pack 3 installed. For reasons only known to Redmondnites, text files with the .java, .jsp, .php, .acx and a host of other IBM extensions are just not searched by the Windows Explorer search facility. Or if they are they miss single line entries like:
wphead()
in the files. This is just nonsense. It adds to the developer workload and flies in the face of the above Interoperability agreements and seems to add one more example of Microsoft’s development managers’ penchant for going over board “playing hardball” to ensure that only Microsoft software runs best in Windows.
This and a hundred and one interoperability gaps in Visual Studio and the full array of Microsoft development software (just think how far Microsoft is from delivering truly interoperable JavaScript, DOM, CSS, SVG, and other Cloud standards) make developing with Microsoft tools and programs such a burden. And this is happening when the market is demanding more open, standards-based, and interoperable software.
I know the Microsoft-DOJ Consent Decrees were supposed to eliminate this type of behavior.. but apparently petty hacking and cheating is now deeply ingrained as a part of the Microsoft DNA.