Interoperabilità.
Pare questa la nuova parola d'ordine in casa MS, tra l'altro da una lettera scritta dallo stesso Bill Gates. Il concetto nella lettera è ripetuto più volte, ve ne proponiamo un passaggio:

First, we continue to support customers’ needs for software that works well with what they have today. Second, we are working with the industry to define a new generation of software and Web services based on eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which enables software to efficiently share information and opens the door to a greater degree of "interoperability by design" across many different kinds of software.