Today, Steve Martin of Microsoft wrote a post criticizing the secrecy behind the development of Cloud
Computing interoperability guidelines. He has attacked the attempts by some
vendors who are trying to push interoperability guidelines. He has called for an
open process instead of a closed approach, supposedly, taken by these
vendors.
The first part of his post, where he touts Microsoft’s
embrace of openness and how they have strived to achieve openness and
interoperability while developing standards in the past, is plain nonsense. Come
on!! Who are you kidding? Long time industry observers know how open Microsoft
was and the kind of role it played in the standardization processes. Probably,
the Youtube generation may not be aware of it but I am old enough to see through
the nonsense in that part of his post.
But the second, and the most important, part of the
post is their call for openness in the drafting of Cloud interoperability
standards. I definitely agree that there should be openness in the drafting of
any standards. It should be both democratic and open. As Microsoft points out in
the above said post, there should not be any vendor bias in the standardization
process. It is important that an independent body plays a major role in ensuring
an open process to develop these standards.
While I could agree with Microsoft on this principle,
this post about lack of openness appears to be hypocritical. It sounds like a
loser desperately trying to get a foothold in the marketplace. Where was their
sense of openness while developing desktop standards? Where was their sense of
openness when they tried (still trying) to elbow open source out of the picture?
What happened to their sense of real openness when they tried to force their way
through the backdoor into the OSI license approval process? Did they even know the
term openness when they tried to force Internet Explorer down our throats in the
early days on internet?
Dear Microsoft, what you are advocating here is an
important issue for the very success of Cloud Computing. In fact, I have told
many times, in my posts here at Cloud Ave, that I want Microsoft to be a major
player in the Cloud Computing marketplace. I have even argued that Microsoft’s
presence is essential for even establishing the credibility of Cloud Computing
in the enterprise segment. But, before we trust Microsoft and line behind the
company to fight for an open process to develop interoperability guidelines, we
want to see Microsoft establish credibility in terms of “openness” as defined by
the real world. Until then, any talk of openness by Microsoft will appear to be
just hypocritical and it may even derail any attempts to fight secrecy in
developing Cloud interoperability guidelines.
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