Quite a big splash was made by Microsoft when it announced that it was opening itself up by publishing specifications to much of its source code to promote interoperability. Sean Nolan, chief architect for HealthVault, made an announcement similar to this which I referenced in a post on the implications of this move by Microsoft.

But maybe the European cynics had it right in fining Microsoft anyway shortly after this announcement was made for reports are now coming out of the big Tech fair CeBIT that the specifications published leave out a lot of key functions in certain programs, such as recurrent events in Outlook.  Remains to be seen whether or not this was a simple oversight on Microsoft’s part, after all some 30,000+ pages of documentation was part of the specifications release, but based on Microsoft’s less than stellar past record, maybe the Europeans have it right.