I’m a believer…

That statement should be no surprise really, as I am frequently reminded, I’m an employee of Microsoft so I have to be a believer don’t I?

That isn’t totally fair, last time I checked I still carried my own opinions on just about every topic that is up for debate in our industry today, most of which align well with my employer and some that don’t – yet.

As to why I’m a believer I thought I’d share some thoughts from a conversation that I ended up in earlier this week.

The discussion was in Australia and with a long standing and well respected standards expert. We were debating Microsoft’s involvement in standards and if the company could be trusted to stay at the table and follow through with the statements that we have made in recent months, committing us to standards adoption, development and maintenance.

My personal observations of big strategic shifts that the company makes is that they are nowhere near as straight forward as you would assume if you were reading blogs or watching the press. They are rarely unilateral enforced changes that force every employee to do something different today compared to what they did yesterday.

It has been quite a few years now since I joined Microsoft and I remember the culture inside the company being a bit of a shock to me when I first joined. Prior to Microsoft I worked for a well known bank in the UK where we had a very traditional hierarchical chain of management, decision making and change management, if the boss said change was coming then we all changed.

My early days in Microsoft were a little frightening as I watched developers or other individuals push back on decisions being made by management, and then seeing those decisions morph into something more acceptable to most people in the room – something that would have been unheard of back in the bank.

Watching the company make big shifts in technical strategy feels like watching meta versions of those early meetings. Our adoption of open source as a component of our business is a good example.

If I go back about a decade only a tiny number of people in Microsoft seemed to know what open source was, I knew them both well. They worked in my corridor in Building 26 at the time. They were enthusiastic folks, it was obviously an uphill struggle for them to get support for their ideas, but they persevered. Eventually they managed to push WiX out onto SourceForge under the CPL, a small step in OSS terms, a big early step for Microsoft.

What has happened between then and today is that more and more people within Microsoft have taken the time to learn about the opportunity that open source brings, and as a result have worked out how it applies to their part of the business. As OSS projects get kicked off there isn’t a “borg” like way of delivering or managing these projects, individuals make decisions about what works for them, some are spot on, some not quite so perfect as a couple of recent examples have shown. Regardless, everybody learns along the way.

Somewhere along the line senior management throw their support behind these projects and eventually, at some point in the future, an open source element may just become something that Microsoft does as part of the general lifecycle of many products. It is impossible to say when that will be, or speak with any absolute certainty about exactly what it will look like when it happens. Individuals will make the final decisions about the details, and you can’t second guess them.

Like many big changes before it though, you will probably wake up one sunny morning, somebody will use open source and Microsoft together in the same sentence and nobody will notice… it will just be the way of things.

When I step back and look at the companies drive for standards and interoperability I can see a very similar pattern.

You can see the early examples of individuals doing their best to support one standard or another, sometimes getting it right, sometimes missing the mark. You can also see more and more Microsoft people talking about standards, getting involved in developing standards and participating in technical committees that relate to their part of the business.

Internally product groups are starting to talk about the opportunities that are made available by standardizing one piece of technology or another, or what happens if a piece of our existing product is swapped out for, or complemented by, an existing standard or specification.

Finally the public support for interoperability and standards has come from the highest levels in the company in the form of the Interoperability Principles which signals to everybody involved that we’re past the milestone of full support from the business leaders… it is big change in the making.

For me at least, the key is in understanding what it takes to make that level of change real in a company like Microsoft, especially with Microsoft’s culture, and then making a guess about how far along the continuum we are.

It isn’t about a Corporate Vice President standing up and declaring that from today onwards we will all be standards compliant, it is about 70,000 employees all working on diverse sets of products becoming aware of the opportunities that interoperability and standards present to the company, then working out what that means for their particular product or business unit – of course the CVP support helps, obviously it makes a real difference, but it is eventually the individuals that make the decision to embrace interoperability as a part of their everyday activities that makes the change happen.

If I look at the curve that places open source at a point where it is understood by Microsoft as a company then I would guess that we have grown from the two guys in building 26 understanding open source ten years ago to somewhere in the region of 50k employees understanding it today, and as a result you’re starting to see the external effect in terms of products, projects and general behaviors from various teams.

Interoperability and standards is probably a little way behind the shift to understand open source, but internally and externally it is hard to disagree with the statement that it is on the same trajectory.

It will be a while before I expect to see everybody get everything absolutely right in the interoperability domain, you can probably predict that there will be hiccups along the way.

So long as we learn from those hiccups, and the vibrant conversations that are taking place on the topic of interoperability and standards inside and outside of the company continue then, well, I’ll remain a believer.