Doug’s World

Open XML and Open Microsoft

Yesterday was a great day for the launch of OpenXmlDeveloper.org. First Bill Gates talked about XML for a long time at the beginning of his keynote, including the announcement of OpenXmlDeveloper.org.

Then we were Slashdotted. They couldn’t find much negative to say, and as somebody who knows all the details of how and why this site was built, I found the theories being offered about “the true goals” of the site and community very entertaining.

The Office Open XML file formats sessions at Devcon played to packed rooms in the afternoon. Brian Jones (above) kicked things off, and by the time Kevin Boske started his presentation late in the afternoon every seat was taken in the huge room and developers were lining the walls

Later in the evening, after beers and appetizers at the conference, a bunch of developers and Microsoft people met up at Parlor Billiards in Bellevue to enjoy some free drinks, food, and pool. And — surprise — talk a lot about the XML file formats. Everyone was upbeat and excited about what the future holds for Office and other applications that work with the new formats. And the range of participants was great, from lifelong Microsoft boosters like Stephen Peront to Antti from Finland, who told Alan Yates that if he had attended a Microsoft event like this just a year or two ago, he’d have been tempted to strap explosives to his body.

Microsoft’s new openness, both in technical terms (the open file formats) and in general terms (thousands of blogs like this where each of us can say what we really think, no spin, no PR/marketing approval required) was a recurring point of conversation all day long. On OpenXmlDeveloper.org, one of our first posts was an article about how to generate a Word document from Java, without using any Microsoft technologies at all. You think you’ll ever see Apple or Sun or Red Hat publish something like that, an example of how to solve a real-world business problem without running a single line of their code? Don’t hold your breath!

Meanwhile over 100 people quietly registered on the site in the first day, and when we start posting all the content we’ll have soon, I’m sure that number will rise rapidly. As people said on Slashdot yesterday, OpenXmlDeveloper.org is “just informational.” That’s right, guys — while others fight political battles and pander to bureaucrats and lobbyists, we’re going to “just” provide lots of specific information to help developers build world-class software around the Open XML Formats. If that’s evil, then we’re planning to be extremely evil on OpenXmlDeveloper.org.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 22nd, 2006 at 9:18 am. You can subscribe to comments on this post through its RSS feed.