Has Microsoft turned over a new leaf?

In the past, Microsoft has tried to persuade everyone to stick to the tradition of the IT business – namely, stay with Microsoft products and purchase new licences regularly. However, Microsoft seems to be quietly changing the way it works.

Microsoft is, for example, adapting its licensing to the growing use of multicore processors and service-oriented architecture (SOA). While Oracle charges 75 percent of a full licence price per processor core, Microsoft has opted to charge per processor socket, which is far easier to understand. And Microsoft is talking about dynamic instancing for the future – essentially a pay-per-use business model that fits more readily with SOAs.

And Microsoft is finally accepting that its own products are not the answer to everything. For example, Microsoft’s involvement in Sun’s Project Tango acknowledges that Java is important in the marketplace. That goes not only for the enterprise market, with J2EE and the latest incarnation, Java EE 5, but also for the mobile market, where the total number of subscribers will reach an estimated 2.6 billion this year. Meanwhile, analysts predict that 900 million mobile handsets will be purchased this year.

Project Tango is an open-source implementation of Sun’s Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT) – the first fruit of the much publicised rapprochement between Sun and Microsoft. This system should support security, reliable messaging and atomic transactions: database transactions that either commit properly or are automatically rolled back, freeing application developers from handling incomplete transactions in their own code.

Meanwhile, the development of the Windows Communications Foundation from Windows Vista onwards will provide a reference implementation of web services interoperability between disparate systems. The objective is to produce compatible stacks of plug-and-play web services for interoperability between Java and Microsoft .Net environments.

One result should be that application developers will have more flexibility. In theory, a developer could write an application with Java and if it needs to interoperate with a .Net application, it will. Of course, there are likely to be teething problems at first, but this initiative is a significant step in the right direction.

Another result should be the disappearance of the notion that either environment is better and that every user should decamp to one or other of them right now.

More and more firms will use both environments or will need to interoperate with third-party systems that require both, so the ability for Java and .Net applications to work together will be valuable.

And maybe both Sun and Microsoft will learn that a small part of a very big market can be worth a lot more than 100 percent of a lesser one.