Years ago when you'd go to a working group most of the people in the working group would be from universities. Now most of the people are from companies who are building internet products and care what the standards turn out to be.
Microsoft is involved in setting some fairly key standards and people are afraid of it because they think, Geez, they are quite capable. It's daunting, I suppose.
I would encourage nonproprietary standards for tools and libraries.
A vendor neutral, standards-based approach must be adopted
The brand new user interfaces that Nintendo invented often faced skeptical views before a hardware launch but wound up becoming de facto industry standards.
We tell anybody who asks that we think Apple is making a big mistake by not being compatible.
It's not easy to remember, but IBM was the computer industry when I was growing up. You loved 'em. You hated 'em. You knew what they were doing. They had set a standard for mainframes. They also set a standard for great sales focus and heavy product R & D.
We have repeatedly demonstrated our species's bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good.
