Eric Sink On The Benefits Of Transparency

Eric Sink, "The Tenets Of Transparency" : "Reminding my readers once again that I am not a Microsoft employee, I observe that over the last year or two, the world has seen a different posture from the developer tools groups at Microsoft. They've opened up. The buzzword for this movement is "transparency". Some folks have told me that the leadership driving this concept comes straight down from Eric Rudder, Senior Vice President in charge of Servers and Tools.

This concept of transparency is visible in many different ways, including their Community Technology Previews and the Product Feedback Center. But perhaps the most obvious change is the ubiquity of weblogs by Microsofties of all kinds. Not that long ago I was habitually reading every weblog written by a Microsoft employee, every day. Today there are so many Microsoft weblogs I just can't begin to read them all. Only Scoble can read that much stuff. :-)

In this column, I want to closely examine this concept of transparency and talk about why it is so important, even for a small ISV."

Another good article by Eric Sink. It's also a worthwhile exercise applying the transparency test to Oracle; whilst some areas are very transparent and visible (tools development, application server) others (database, applications) are a closed book. I wonder why? You can read more of Eric's articles in my earlier posting "Eric Sink On The Business Of Software (... And Consulting)"