'By increasing the openness of our products, we will provide developers additional opportunity to innovate and deliver value for customers,' said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, as Microsoft this morning announced the implementation of four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products.

"These steps represent an important step and significant change in how we share information about our products and technologies," said Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer (pictured). "For the past 33 years, we have shared a lot of information with hundreds of thousands of partners around the world and helped build the industry, but today's announcement represents a significant expansion toward even greater transparency. 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."

Specifically, Microsoft is implementing four new interoperability principles and corresponding actions across its high-volume business products:

1. ensuring open connections
2. promoting data portability
3. enhancing support for industry standards
4. fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including open source communities

"Customers need all their vendors, including and especially Microsoft, to deliver software and services that are flexible enough such that any developer can use their open interfaces and data to effectively integrate applications or to compose entirely new solutions," said Ozzie.

According to Ozzie, the announcement reflects the significance that individuals and businesses place upon the ease of information-sharing.

The interoperability principles and actions announced today apply to the following high-volume Microsoft products: Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007, and future versions of all these products.