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So is putting tens of thousands of pages of documentation on to its website, making promises to the open-source community and smiling sweetly to every regulator and standards committee, going to be enough to keep the hounds off its back? Perhaps - but Microsoft's new openness needs to be proven not only in an initial push but in the hard grimy detail that you have to wade through when trying to write code that interoperates. And missing items will be noticed. There's a huge amount of detail there, but is it actually properly documented? It's impossible to know at the moment.

I would like to think this is one of the defining moments in the creation of the New Microsoft. But there are still too many Old Microsoft dinosaurs in the company who have that fixated grin. The proof, as always, will be in the pudding.