Once upon a time, in a land far away, there was a team of Microsoft employees. They operated in a black box, a silo of noncommunication. In order to learn what was in the new products they were developing you had to wait until they were released. There were no seeds, the prerelease software distributed to partners was codenamed with words like longhorn and the developers, if they spoke out of turn were publicly flogged with cat-o-nine-tails made of rusty old x86 hardware, known as flogware.
But then something happened. Microsoft, to whatever degree, embraced a world of openness. The developers for various teams were suddenly encouraged to blog, speak publicly and even microblog. The flogware was set aside and the Hyrulians rejoiced as it seemed Link had saved them from Ganon. Today, you can keep track of development efforts and the general direction of Windows, Exchange, Storage Server, SQL, SCCM and VMM. You can download betas of Windows 7 (or could) even though it has yet to be released without being a partner. Anyone can access the support pages. Microsoft even shows up to places like BlackHat and DefCon begging people to break things because they want to make sure it’s as stable and secure a product as possible before it hits the market.
Overall, Microsoft, while not open sourcing their code, are to some degree becoming a more open and honest company. And the result is that many in the IT industry have stopped looking at Microsoft as a monolithic, evil empire. We are starting to see the various units and those who work in the various units and know them, to some degree, as people. The softer side of Microsoft is more innovative than during the tumultuous time when Ganondorf was new.
Sure the rubber band may snap back and Vaati may break his seal to terrorize the good employees once again (all it takes is for one person to make a terrible blunder online methinks for a kneejerk reaction to undo all the great faith they’ve been building). But for now, Microsoft is able to improve software more than ever, stand out as more gentle leader in the IT space and let the people who use their products know that they’re working hard to improve those products every day. I wish more IT vendors were as open in their processes as Microsoft has proven to be these days.