A Busy Week for Interoperability

This week is going to be a hectic one for the interop team here at Microsoft. Tomorrow morning we are dropping a press release (which I will comment on tomorrow), which I hope will take a very positive step forward on the interop front. It will be the third time this fall that we are making use of the OSP. Later in the week we will be hosting our first Interoperability Executive Customer Council (which we originally announced back in June). My team, and all of those we work with accross MS on interop issues, is working flat out and it is great to see those efforts being to really pay off.

I've talked about the idea that interop by design is acheived through multiple means. This week we are going to be focusing on the idea of how community can influence interoperability and what more we can acheive through access to our technologies. There is also an element of how IP interacts with the standards arena which I'll dig into a bit more after tomorrow's news.

I wholeheartedly reject Bob Sutor's claim that interop = substitutability, which is predictable but I do this for the same reasons I reject the idea that interop = open standards. Anyone who is taking a deeper look at interoperability is going to quickly begin to form a million models as to how to describe something that is intangible, but you know it when you see it. 

I am hopeful that this week is going to shine a spotlight on a few more pieces of the puzzle resulting in our seeing interop a bit more clearly.