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Could Steve Ballmer get any more confusing? He laments the lack of openness in the iPhone OS and Google’s Android, will swear up one side and down the other that proprietary walled gardens are better, but then publicly contemplates an open future for Microsoft’s flagship browser! At the Power to Developer’s conference in Sydney, Australia, Ballmer was conducting a Q & A session with the audience, when a student in the audience posed this rather interesting question:

“Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?”

Ballmer’s response, though rambling, began with typical corporate stall tactics: “That’s cheeky, but a good question, but cheeky.” Ballmer continued, musing that Microsoft might consider where value could be added in the browser with proprietary code, versus using open source code that could respond more readily to changing web standards. This means that IE could have an open rendering engine, such as WebKit, while preserving proprietary extensions like ActiveX to keep users locked into IE. A scary scenario, to say the least: users would get all the benefits of work by Apple, Google, and others on the WebKit rendering engine, but still be stuck using IE at critical junctions by proprietary, non standards-based code from Microsoft. 

Key advantages of WebKit adoption for Microsoft would include reduced development time for future browser releases (anybody else notice the five-year gap between IE 6 and 7?), as well as a mobile browser. This sudden rush for openness from Microsoft may be little more than an admission that the software giant no longer rules the roost when it comes to software. The aging Widows Mobile browser is substandard by any measure, and Microsoft has no clear path to create a blazing fast, lightweight mobile browser as Apple did with Safari. It would appear that Microsoft’s own proprietary code base is now holding them back from the innovation needed to meet the challenges posed by more nimble competitors. The real question in all of this is whether the world will ever see cross-platform ActiveX, which would give Microsoft a much bigger venue for many of its products, including popular office collaboration tools in SharePoint. Could we see an iPhone app for SharePoint in the near future?

Via [AppleInsider]