January, 2011

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Openness@Microsoft

Are you open or closed?

Posted over 2 years ago

by jamesu1
- 1 Comments
Posted by James Utzschneider
General Manager, Sales, Marketing and Services Group

My name is James Utzschneider, and I work in Microsoft’s Sales, Marketing, and Services Group leading a team responsible for worldwide marketing efforts around open source and emerging technologies.
Today we are kicking off what we hope will be an ongoing dialogue on observations and insights from people inside and outside our company on the topic of Microsoft and “Openness”.

Why are we doing this now? In my 15 years with Microsoft, this is certainly one of the most interesting times the tech industry has seen in the area of standards, interoperability and open source -- and we are excited to share our perspective on these topics.

Just look at some of the things that are happening right now. You have vendors fighting over who has the most “open” HTML 5 implementation. You have people from Mozilla saying that out of the big vendors only Microsoft gets web standards. You have Steve Jobs saying when that when people hear the word open, they think Windows. There are movements around Open Government, Open Data, Open Web, even Open Knowledge. Is something open because it’s a standard? Or because it uses open source? Or if it is free of patents? Or if it is freely available on the web? Or if it is used by everyone with published APIs? Or if a company simply says it’s open?

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