Building Software That Is Interoperable By Design is the title of an Executive email by Bill Gates. Yesterday CBDi posted An open letter to Microsoft on interoperability as a response to the email.
The main topics of CBDi's response are:
- Creation of open interoperability standards is a long term project
- WS-* addresses the outer layer of the problem
- Business and technical relevance of services
- Simplification: An opportunity for Microsoft
Summary of the response
In our [CBDi's] opinion interoperability by design is a worthwhile long term goal, but focusing on enabling collaborations between disparate systems is merely the first step of a much longer and far more important journey. Addressing the issues of interoperability and complexity in a thorough manner will deliver genuine business agility and we recommend that for Microsoft this is an issue that deserves a similar level of attention that was given to the Internet and Security. We urge you to take this broader view of interoperability by design and to provide leadership and education in this critically important area. The attainment of broad industry standards of a technical interoperability layer is of course very important, but it is only the first step, and we encourage you personally and the Microsoft corporation to articulate this vision to your staff, partners and customers.
Worth reading when you're designing and building service oriented systems and/or superficial interoperability solutions.
More info on Microsoft interop on http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/interop/default.mspx