How Microsoft could really stun the world next week

Last night it occurred to me how Microsoft could stun the world next week at its Professional Developers Conference.

Appoint a Chief Standards Officer.

Sun Microsystems already has one, but there are a lot of other good reasons for Microsoft to do this.

1. Microsoft already (effectively) has a Chief Openness Officer, Robert Scoble. "Open" and "standards" go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

2. Microsoft has begun a detente with the open source community. "Open source" and "open standards" go together like, yep, chocolate and peanut butter.

3. If Windows Vista is as good as we'll be told it is next week, embracing standards will be less risky for Microsoft going forward. People will stay with Windows not because of file-format lock-in but because of the truly superior experience.

4. The Microsoft Chief Standards Officer wouldn't have to demand that every application have standards-based native data formats. All Microsoft would have to announce is seamless support of standard formats as a second supported format. Think seamless support of the OASIS OpenDocument format. Seamless support of iCal. Seamless support of RSS. Sure, create extensions, but support the basic standard. Lure people to the extensions, but keep on supporting the standard. Look at how well Apple plays this game.

5. Pull together disparate efforts already underway within Microsoft to embrace more standards. For instance, July's announcement that Microsoft is collaborating with the Web Standards Project.

To be most effective, the Chief Standards Officer probably can't be as far down the org chart as Robert Scoble is (at least, on paper!) The position probably needs to have status equal to Jim Allchin.

I'll be at PDC in Los Angeles next week. If anyone reading this wants to meet with me to further develop the job description of a Microsoft Chief Standards Officer -- I haven't even mentioned patents -- drop me a line. If there's enough interest, maybe we could set up our own BoF!

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