What's wrong with Microsoft?

First, Microsoft offered Mozilla development team a free office inside the Microsoft HQs. Then CEO Steve Ballmer embraced open source as the new panacea for solving document exchange and software virtualisation. Microsoft will provide ODF document filters for OpenOffice. The Open Specification Promise is yet another step towards an open software development. Interoperability suddenly is important to the worlds largest software company.

Only recently, Microsoft announced the start of Office Live, an online office suite targeted at customers currently using Googles online office tools.

Has Microsoft changed?

Does Microsoft see the advantages of open software development?

Has Microsoft earned enough money to provide us with free software in the future?

Rest assured, nothing has changed!

If Microsoft wants to play a significant role in Europe in the future, they have to prove that charges against them for exclusive and uncompetitive business bare any substance.

While in the US it suffices to claim open business conduct and bribe their way through the current administration, the EU does not work like that. Actually, the rest of the world does not work like that.

So, Microsofts move towards Open Source is just a marketing trick to circumvent EU embargos, a door opener into shops that switched to Open Source recently and most of all a convenient way to keep a close eye on the development of new technologies.