I’ll believe it when the customer of MS products does have a genuine choice to run non-MS products without finding the standard wasn’t the whole story. At my most cynical, I’d say that MS have claimed to support open standards in the past, and there’s always been a catch somewhere along the line – ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish’ is the common pattern of course.

But, I’ll wait and see – it’s not impossible that they will eventually move to genuinely supporting open standards, in spirit rather than as a marketing bullet point. It’s just extremely unlikely. I’ll be looking for the small print.

As for implementing standards, I’d argue that even they are getting better at doing that, VC++ for instance is a pretty standards compliant compiler, IE is getting there, the .Net framework allows use of several security standards for identity both closed and open standards. I’m sure they’re is good counter arguments for all of those, but there is a slow momentum building for more openess.

I respect Miguel a lot, but I do think that Mono is ultimately a good PR tool for MS without actually addressing the issue of MS lock-in, because the ‘official’ .Net is always different. Mono as a platform is great, but while it has differences from .Net it’s not going to be a serious competitor for MS’s core customer base. It’ll be fine at the fringes, but the core business base will have no choice but to stick with MS or end up with something that isn’t implemented yet or doesn’t work quite right. It’s the very best case for MS – it looks like a competitor, but actually isn’t, at least for the majority of people who gravitate to .Net, like businesses.

It would be great if ALL the infrastructure was completely portable, and MS differentiated themselves just on tools and great implementations of a common standard. But that’s not what’s happened and to be honest I would be amazed if it ever happened – that’s just not how MS have ever worked. MS can’t survive like Apple, their models are entirely different – MS has to sell bucketloads of software via a cascading value chain – you like Office, that leads you to buy Exchange, Windows Servers, etc because they’re the only things that work together in that arena properly (because MS control all the standards and change them whenever they like). Apple has to sell hardware, differentiated by some user-facing software. It’s very different – and it also works very well for consumer software, where lock-in is less of an issue – for business software, Apple would be just as bad in terms of lock-in. I don’t think even if MS’s attitude changes, it can never change fundamentally enough for it to be a true competitive landscape. It’s just not in their interests. And that in itself is not in the customer interest, at the end of the day – so there’s an inherent conflict there. There is always a conflict of interest when a supplier wants / needs to lock customers in to their set of platforms/software/whatever – no matter what supplier it is, that conflict is there. Luckily for customers, there are more options now – business platforms that are implemented the same way on multiple platforms and from multiple vendors. This is a very good thing and levels the playing field considerably, if you’re willing to take advantage of it. Suppliers like MS take advantage of short-sighted strategies that say ‘well, this tool is nice right now, I’ll use it’ to get people dependent on their systems – all suppliers try it too, albeit not as successfully. It’s really up to the savvy customer to stay alert about exactly what situation they’re getting themselves into and to control their own environments, and to resist giving away control of their own destiny in return for a nice front-end.

He seems to be encouraging MS to embrace the idea of open sourcing more of it’s technology and this “mix” of proprietary and OSS solutions. Hmm, is there a job offer at MS somewhere in his future? He offered a good example of how the OSX kernel is OSS, but much of the rest of OSX is propiertary. A fact of which I was unaware.

@Dan: yep, agreed. This is why open source can be such a refreshing alternative. It’s all about control really – I don’t like being controlled, penned in, guided – no matter who it is. No-one has your best interests at heart except you – assume every company is trying to screw you, and you’ll probably be close to the mark

You are right though – doesn’t matter which supplier you choose Apple, MS, Sony, Sun – the decision you make should always be as well informed as possible – never fueled just by religious-like hatrid or love for a particular company.