5 Dumbest Things on Wall Street: April 3

Microsoft's Head is in the Clouds

How ironic that Microsoft (Stock Quote: MSFT) is complaining about lack of openness among rivals trying to establish some standards for the latest Internet trend—cloud computing.

How often has Microsoft big-footed the rest of the computer world, trying to force everyone to play its way? This is, after all, a company that ran afoul of antitrust regulators in both the U.S. and Europe.

So where does Microsoft get the moxie to complain about lack of openness among a group of rivals who put their differences aside to create some industry standards for the way virtual resources are shared in the "cloud" (a metaphor for the Internet)?

Clearly, Microsoft is chaffed that it's not the leader of the pack. The open cloud manifesto is being spearheaded by IBM (Stock Quote: IBM). Ouch!

Although Microsoft agrees with the general principle behind the manifesto, the company complained that it had little opportunity to contribute.

"We were admittedly disappointed by the lack of openness in the development of the Cloud Manifesto," wrote Steven Martin, Microsoft's director of developer platform product management, in a blog. Martin said that Microsoft was shown a copy of the "secret" document privately, and told that it must be signed "as is," without modifications or additional input.

IBM says the initial document is just a starting point. "It's purposely a very high-level document because we want a broad group of companies to be able to come to the table -- then we will start the hard work of figuring out what's in and what's out from a technology standpoint," said IBM spokeswoman Kelly Sims.

More than 30 companies and organizations have already signed up to support the manifesto, including big hitters such as Cisco Systems (Stock Quote: CSCO), EMC (Stock Quote: EMC), VMware (Stock Quote: VMW), AMD (Stock Quote: AMD), and AT&T (Stock Quote: T).

No wonder Microsoft is miffed, being tossed in with all the riff raff like that. How insulting!

By James Rogers.

Dumb-o-meter score: 75 -- Big Blue better watch its back.