Dan Gillmor asked in a recent weblog entry whether Microsoft was changing for the better. Frankly, if someone told me that the old leopard was changing its spots, I'd be sceptical. Microsoft-bashing is overdone already, so I won't hold it against you if you skip this log entry. I only include it because it's basically a copy-and-paste job from email.

Yes, I decided to put my vote in with Dan, and of course I voted against Microsoft. I have learned to live with Microsoft, but that doesn't mean I have to like them. What follows is the substantial content of my email to Dan, explaining my reasons.

Microsoft is the ultimate corporate control freak: demonstrations of this fact abound throughout their history. From "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run", to dirty tricks with Win3.1 and DR-DOS, to the more recent cutting off of Netscape's air supply, they are a company that cannot abide the notion of having significant competitors in any market segment. Show me a product that threatens Microsoft's absolute (or effectively absolute) control of a market, and I will show you the thing they most want to kill. From this perspective and in light of recent events, I see that open source software (especially the software bundles usually called "Linux distributions", or "GNU/Linux" if you wish to bow to Richard Stallman) is something that Microsoft considers a threat to its control.

Microsoft is not happy with merely being the market leader: they like to control the market.

If Microsoft uses a protocol like XML without doing an embrace and extend on it, it won't be the first time. They implemented TCP/IP for Windows in a manner that had very little in the way of Microsoft proprietarisms, and those minor points they did extend they have not attempted to use as leverage against competitors (as far as I am aware). But why should non-malicious use of a standard be seen as a plus? Only against a history of manipulating standards to break competitors' products can such a neutral thing be seen as a positive. I suppose that against a backdrop of "browser wars" with Netscape (not that Netscape behaved any better), breaking compatibility with Samba in every Windows service pack, and bastardising the Kerberos protocol, using XML without immediate and overt attempts to proprietarise it can be seen as "good behaviour" rather than "ordinary behaviour".

Still, it's a bit early in the piece to claim that Microsoft is being nice with XML. There's almost no benefit to be had in extending XML in a proprietary way, any more than it would be useful to break TCP/IP. XML is a metalanguage — a way of describing data. If Microsoft is likely to embrace and extend anything, it will be at the level of particular XML doctypes, not XML in general, I believe.

Microsoft is not changing for the better; it remains an extreme control freak. The fact that there are standards it is not attempting to control is not evidence against this: the evidence exists in the standards and markets that it is trying to control.