Well, the big boys in Redmond are finally starting to get it. Microsoft said today that it’s going to start embracing open standards and interoperability in a major way, announcing a set of new principles and a commitment to support open standards. In a press conference this morning, CEO Steve Ballmer and chief software architect Ray Ozzie announced a new initiative to open up its products and foster better interoperability with competing products.

At its heart, Microsoft it hoping to embrace four new interoperability principles:

- Ensuring open connections

- Promoting data portability

- Enhancing support for industry standards

- Fostering more open engagement with customers and the industry, including the open source community.

There are six “high-volume” products that will be covered by the interoperability initiatives: Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007. Microsoft said it will make the APIs and communications protocols available for those products royalty- and license-free, starting with over 30,000 pages of previously tightly-controlled documentation for Windows client and server protocols.

Office 2007 will be given new APIs so that developers can offer support for other document formats and users can set Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to save in other formats by default if so desired, thus “guaranteeing an open and level playing field,” Ozzie said. Microsoft also guaranteed that Office 2007 will support the Open Document Format.

The company is also promising not to sue open-source developers who use its protocols in their applications, as long as the distribution of the applications is noncommercial, so commercial open-source implementations will still require a patent license from Microsoft.

The announcement speaks for itself, and represents both a monumental shift in Microsoft’s stance towards open standards, which has been a source of frequent criticism over the years, and the software industry’s understanding that interoperability between software solutions will become one of the defacto standards by which software will be measured moving forward.

That said, I’ve always watched Microsoft’s initiatives in this area with a wary eye, going all the way back to when Microsoft launched their Community License, in which SugarCRM was the first open source apps vendor to join. Microsoft has been leading up to this announcement throughout the course of the year, and this is as much about open protocols and APIs as it is true open source, but give credit where credit is due, as Microsoft is clearly made an effort over the past few years to reposition itself as a friend to open standards. Given the company’s long and checkered history in these areas, I’ll want to see today’s words translated into tangible results before acknowledging Microsoft as a champion of open standards and product interoperability…but this is certainly a step in the right direction.