Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates announced Windows Open Services Architecture at Esther Dyson’s annual bash in Tucson, Arizona: the architecture is described as the formalisation of on-going work undertaken by Microsoft to address the need to connect Windows-based workstations with heterogeneous environments within the enterprise; it designed to provide a formal isolation layer between Windows-based applications and a variety of communications services to work with heterogeneous environments, providing an open set of application programming interfaces to access these back-end services; applications written to the interfaces will be able to interoperate with multiple environments concurrently.
