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Openness and Interoperability

Tags: digital policy, interoperability, open source

“Our goal is to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice for customers and developers throughout the industry by making our products more open and by sharing even more information about our technologies.”

— Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft

Openness for interoperability

We are listening. We recognize our responsibility as an industry leader to be more open, more interoperable and offer more choice to meet the needs of businesses, governments and consumers. This is why we are transforming the way we work and live up to our interoperability commitment by working to four fundamental principles:

Open connections: We share more information about our product innovations with industry to allow other companies’ products to work with our own. We‘re open to choice and change because we believe that openness is what helps us all move forward.

Standards: Technical standards are an important tool to enhance interoperability among products. Each year, Microsoft contributes to and collaborates with more than 150 national and international standards organizations.

Data portability: We believe that once customers use one software product to store their data, they should be able to access that data in a form that allows it to be used in other software products from different vendors.

Open engagement: We recognise that no single company can address interoperability challenges alone. We team up with customers, partners, and competitors to ensure that our systems interoperate. This includes working with open source communities by way of commercial partnerships, cooperative engineering agreements, and technical collaboration.

There’s no silver bullet for interoperability—we all know that. However, a more open approach from Microsoft means that organizations will have a choice of technologies that work together. This means more opportunity for customers, for developers, for partners, for competitors, and for us. That’s good for customers, good for our business and good for the IT industry. For us, the future is built on choice.