Today's announcement is a little different than the promises Microsoft has made in the past in that it is publishing the protocols and APIs, not just promising to do so. Of course, only time will tell if the protocols it publishes are lacking in some way.
What Microsoft may be coming to realize is that it is in its best interest to make that information freely available. This could spur an ecosystem of development that will give new, longer life to Windows and Office. The new APIs for Word Excel and PowerPoint is an interesting twist. Given the whole OOXML issue, yet another so-called open document format from Microsoft seems, on the surface, to be shifty, especially given that there seemed to be some softening from the ODF side of the standards community about OOXML. See ODF and OOXML -- can't we all just get along?
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