Noone in the Microsoft development space can have missed the big change that has taken place within Microsoft during the last year. The company goes further in trying to build ties with the developers, employees are blogging, they are trying to get people involved.
Now, I have a healthy amount of suspicion towards Microsoft. I feel I’ve been fucked over by MS a number of times, from when I tried to use Perl with ASP 1.0, through when I tried to make sense of CDO (sparsely documented, 300+ byte IDs,…), to when I tried to use Pocket Outlook Object Model (POOM) on PocketPC for real-world scenarios (ID’s that change when record contents change — you’ve got to be KIDDING me??!).
Posts like Chris Pratley’s post about Word file format disclosure: ”We don’t do that because it is our intellectual property. People who want to work with us can get it by contacting us; people who want to compete with us need to work harder. That’s business. We might change our minds [...] but really it is our prerogative” do nothing to change my suspicion
Microsoft, look; if you’re going to be both platform provider and competitor, you’ll have to accept that people care more about your position as a competitor rather than your position as a platform provider. In that sense, Robert Scoble’s post about ”Mozilla should adapt Longhorn tech” was spectacularly naive considering the history of Internet Explorer and Netscape.
I don’t take anything that Microsoft says at face value any longer. I always factor in what they have to loose and what they have to win. In the POOM case, we were doing a product that competed with Microsoft, so it makes sense (from a shareholder-earning standpoint) that they wouldn’t go to any great length to make my life easier. I’m thinking about this when reading the email thread that wasn’t ”created with public consumption in mind”. I can’t help to think that it was — it seems pretty sanitized to me.
When it comes to redefining Microsoft’s public image, comment’s like Chris Pratley’s don’t help. You’re an established monopoly, now deal with the new rules and expectations. If you want to be a platform vendor, then document your platform. This includes full documentation of the Office formats, CDO, Extended MAPI, and Pocket Outlook Object Model (POOM). This will undermine your position as a application vendor on that platform. Deal with it. Don’t make us rely on undocumented properties and sites like CDOLive. Don’t just skirt the issue by saying that ”it’s your prerogative” to keep things secret.