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So what are we to make of the news that Microsoft hasn't so much as fluttered its kimono in the breeze, as had it fall off and land at its feet in a heap? For Microsoft has decided it's time to open up its APIs and protocols to every Tom, Dick and Harry.

So if you want to interoperate with Vista, Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and SharePoint 2007, you can look forward to spending countless hours wading through the documentation. Even better, you can use this for a not-for-profit development program, although Microsoft still wants its pound of flesh if you want to write a commercial application that uses these interfaces.

Is this move a big deal? Has the Earth just moved for us developers and IT professionals? Or is it a calculated move by Microsoft to hold off the rebels at the main gate?

Naturally, the answer is a mix of everything. But one thing you can be sure of - Microsoft is doing this because it believes, on balance, that it's the best thing for Microsoft. Drop all the niceties about how this is good for openness, for customers, for your Bonsai tree and how this will encourage greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced. There's only one player in this space that matters to Microsoft, and that's Microsoft. And why not? It's a company that's responsible to shareholders.

So why has the Great Beast of Redmond decided now is a good time? Well, it comes down to that balancing of good and bad. On the one hand, it doesn't want to open up these APIs. I'm sure Microsoft can put on its best smile and claim otherwise in the manner of a white-toothed car salesman, but

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it doesn't want to play the open game. It takes effort, it makes changing things behind the scenes more awkward and it opens up a level of accountability that has, until now, been firmly under lock and key.

On the other hand, the situation with the European Commission isn't going away, or getting any easier. I'm sure Microsoft can make some claims for victory over the past year, but look carefully and you'll find the steely eye of the EU still focused on Redmond.

Worse still, the OOXML progression through ISO has been rocky at best, and this is a prime time to be all cuddly and open in the hope that this will cause an uplift in popularity with the committees that will vote shortly on the matter. Hence, the news that Microsoft is going to support other document formats in Office 2007 made me smile. It will make new APIs for Office applications to let developers build their own document formats and plug them in, even allowing, it's claimed, for this new format to be set as the default. Can't you just feel the Office team agreeing to this through gritted teeth while smiling the new Corporate Open-Smile (TM).

And what's this? Microsoft has also just published all the binary file formats for previous Office documents? That Holy Grail of the BIFF file format for Excel, previously only available by giving up your first born, is available for all to read? It seems so, yes.

So let's put the positive spin on all of this and see if it makes sense. Microsoft is opening up all the APIs and function calls (but not the source) for most of its top-line OS and server applications. Plus, it's opened up the file formats for the prevailing desktop document files.

It can be argued that opening up the codebase to older code, such as Server 2003, Exchange 2003 and so forth, is too much work when it isn't the current version. This is quite possibly true. It's also true that those older versions of the applications include code that could rightly be described as "grungy" at best. It shouldn't be forgotten that all the recent big applications from Microsoft are now written in managed code, and a huge amount of old - and probably very embarrassing - earlier code has been swept away.