OStatic

Bowing to what Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called the changing landscape of the IT industry and others call pressure from EU anti-trust actions, Microsoft announced today the release of some of its technical crown jewels: the heretofore secret APIs Microsoft products used to talk with each other.

Microsoft is changing the way it does business and is opening up, according to a long elaborate press release the company issued this morning. I am reading through it and will try and make sense of it all.

Many online news sources continue to be completely dominated by discussion of Microsoft's hostile bid to acquire Yahoo! And no wonder: a deal of this magnitude has the potential to touch the lives of pretty much everyone living and working online. It's a rare web worker indeed who doesn't use something from one or another of those two companies in their daily lives.

While nearly all of the analysis of Microsoft's offer to acquire Yahoo! for close to $45 billion has centered on the Redmond giant's intent to compete with Google for online advertising dollars, swallowing Yahoo! would also plant Microsoft squarely in the middle of the open source software arena. Yahoo! is so firmly entrenched in open source software-from the server farms that its own site runs on, to its Zimbra division delivering open source apps, to the APIs that it offers to application developers-that Microsoft, as corporate parent, would have no choice but to shed much of its long-standing antipathy toward open source.