Microsoft wants an ecosystem

Microsoft, for the past several years, has been using the word "ecosystem" to describe the environment of its software. This is a nice ploy by the marketing side of Microsoft but not an accurate one.

I can see why Microsoft wants the word "ecosystem": It implies an inclusive, organic, and dynamic system.

Yet the Microsoft environment is not that inclusive, and one can argue that it is not that organic. (I will grant the "dynamic" portion of the definition.) The Microsoft environment is more engineered than it is organic, and carefully tended. Microsoft programs and tools connect to other Microsoft programs and tools, with occassional connections to the outside. The most obvious example is Windows: Microsoft products run on Windows and nothing else, with the exception of Microsoft Office for the Macintosh. But the containment does not stop there. Microsoft web-based products run in Internet Explorer and possibly other browsers, but Microsoft makes little effort to support them. (The recent addition of FireFox support for Sharepoint is an exception, and it still does not have equivalent status as IE.) Microsoft products such as Sharepoint and SourceSafe connect to SQL Server but not other databases. Windows uses authentication through ActiveDirectory but not LDAP, and ActiveDirectory connects back to SQL Server.

What Microsoft has is more of a biodome than an ecosystem. Of course, the term "ecosystem" is better marketing than "biodome", which implies a confined space with limited options. But a confined space it is. The question is, can you live in it?