Microsoft Opens Up To The Public

Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch has an article where she sums up the Redmond giants (largely succesful) moves towards being open and honest with its userbase and developers. Microsoft chose this year to try to be more transparent, taking ideas from the open source community about explaining what is in working on. MS was willing to admit when it screwed up (WinFS) and allow more personal channels to the outside world (more than 1,000 employee blogs). It's a great trend, and if a huge supposedly impersonal corporation can pull it off maybe others will follow. Surprisingly, one of the least transparent companies (my opinion)? Google, which never tells anybody what its working on (much like a director who's afraid of blowing the surprise ending).