April 13, 1999 |Last week, Microsoft president Steve Ballmer said that his company is "thinking with great interest" about adopting an open-source strategy -- freeing the long-secret source code to at least parts of its crown-jewel Windows operating system.

In the software industry, this is sort of like the Christian Coalition declaring that it's "thinking with great interest" about endorsing homosexuality, or the Pope announcing that the Vatican is "thinking with great interest" about embracing contraception.

Microsoft has built its staggering business on what it calls "open standards" -- hooks into its software known as "APIs" that independent developers can gain access to -- while jealously guarding the actual code underlying its products. In Microsoft's lexicon, "open" means "we'll show you stuff as long as we still own it and control it and have the right to stop showing it if it suits our business needs."

That strategy has created enormous profits for Microsoft but also a deep distrust of the company among software developers, many of whom have long believed that Microsoft reserves the most important secrets of its APIs for itself. So when Microsoft starts talking about open source, a lot of listeners roll their eyes.

These were Ballmer's words to a crowd at a Windows developers' conference: "There is a level of flexibility, or comfort, that people have when they have the source code, just in case ... We are of course thinking with great interest about that, talking about it with our customers, and when we figure out what that means for us, we'll let you know." He also cautioned, "Most CIOs I talk to don't actually want their people to touch the source. They don't want to introduce new variations, new perturbations, new confusion."

A year ago, I proposed in this column that Microsoft might someday find itself at this juncture: that a crisis in getting the next version of Windows NT out the door, a growing defection of corporate servers to Linux and a sense that it was losing momentum to open-source development might combine to push Microsoft toward thinking the unthinkable. Were last week's statements hints that I was right, and that Microsoft is about to make a radical break with its past? Or are they just tactical feints on Microsoft's part, designed to divide the opposition and cloud the PR waters?

Everyone likes to be able to say "I told you so," but so far the evidence backs the second explanation more than the first.

Next page | Is Microsoft thinking different -- or fighting dirty?