Two aspects of the "new" Microsoft were on display in San Francisco on Tuesday at the computer security industry's biggest annual gathering, the RSA conference.
One came in the person of Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer. A 15-year Microsoft veteran with a background in supercomputing, Mundie's has long had an influential voice in Microsoft core strategic thinking. In the past, though, he has stayed pretty much in the background. At RSA, there he was sitting alongside Bill Gates, chatting broadly about the company's longer-range vision for security. Tellingly, he talked about how he and Gates had between them come up with the five-year-old "Trustworthy Computing" initiative, which marked a watershed in the company's thinking. As Microsoft prepares for Life after Gates, the history books are being rewritten to shift attention to a broader group of executives.
The other aspect was the drum-beat insistence on interoperability that creeps into just about every major presentation by a Microsoft executive these days. Gently, Mundie owned up to Microsoft's fallibility in this department. "We didn't do well in the past," he said, since for system-wide issues like security, effective interoperability is vital.
In future, according to Mundie, Microsoft will model its approach to interoperability on the chip industry. Chips are tightly integrated pieces of technology that have clear interfaces that other companies can "plug" their own technology into. So it will be with software: Microsoft is getting "more hardcore" about tight integration between the proprietary elements in its software, Mundie said. But it will also provide clear interfaces that other security companies can link to. As the company moves beyond its narrow vision of a world where all software is Microsoft, it is as clear a statement of intent as we've yet heard.
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