Microsoft wants to play nicer with the other kids.
The world's biggest software company will concentrate much of its resources on improving its products' ability to communicate with offerings from rivals, said President Steve Ballmer on Friday.
"I would be the first to admit there are times when we blew it," Ballmer told 3,000 developers at a business application conference in Las Vegas. "Every product we have built did not achieve the level of success we had hoped until we focused on interoperability."
Ballmer detailed Microsoft's strategy to improve the way its products communicate with the still widely used Unix platform, and with all kinds of applications from third parties like International Business Machines (IBM).
Microsoft (MSFT) will spend about US$3 billion in research and development, Ballmer said. Of that, about $2.4 billion will go toward improving the "manageability and interoperability" of the company's three "backbone" core products: Windows, its Office suite of business applications, and BackOffice, its network management suit.
"We are still probably, who knows, eight months to 12 months away from NT 5.0 availability," said Ballmer, about the next version of Window NT, Microsoft's flagship business software. Ballmer said that "job one" in the designing of NT 5.0 is to "improve manageability and cost of ownership."
Ballmer also plugged Microsoft's Windows CE operating system for handheld computers as a way for a company's mobile workforce to stay in touch with headquarters.
