Openness and interoperability pay huge dividends

Openness and interoperability not only pay huge dividends, but are the only possible future of computing.

Rather than looking at massive monoliths which can take forever to build (Longhorn, Microsoft's next-generation operating system, is one example), there is a need to modularise software through openly accessible interfaces at various levels. For example, one can imagine"Visual Biz-ic" as a Lego-like development environment to construct business process management libraries for small- and medium-sized enterprises to mirror their information flows.

The Internet Era brought us at real "Internet time" from a world of a "small town" to the world of a "huge continent", from isolated islands to a complicated network that goes from one side of this earth to the other one in a few seconds.
Communications that require a few seconds make the world so small as making a far away continent just next door.

Grid computing is the next step.
A network is done not only for inter communication, but for using many computrs for the same task.
This is what a peer to peer network does in a lower scale.
Connecting more users and exchanging files.
A grid computing does something more.
Exchanging files and interconnecting every computer writes a part of the complex software for the network to which all belong.
A software is made by small pieces loosely joined, where the Lego bricks are all over the world and work together in the "Virtual world", the "Netsphera" and accomplish a big goal, which none of them could do alone.

But in this case openess and interoperability are a "Condicio sine qua non".