Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

What’s most amazing about Microsoft’s openness manifesto announcement today is that it can still coordinate anything of this magnitude at all. Which is impressive as hell right there.  Another amazement: a corporate imperative to enable and encourage engagement with customers. Yes, business customers, but users nonetheless.  Some early-stage entrepreneurial outfits could learn a few things here, as could a lot of the bigger guys.  Microsoft appears to eschew monologue marketing and favor dialogues.  Good on them.   

As for the new “openness” of the products, when you look back, this isn’t anything new.  At least not in theory.  When Bill Gates “opened” talks with IBM circa 1980, as Apple remained a closed shop, the open “interoperability” concept was the common denominator. It became Microsoft’s nuclear propellant and the heart of its value proposition. Microsoft brand promises reaffirmed today: open connections, portability of data, and more engagement with customers and “open-source communities”, according to Redmond.