Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

["Michael D. Thomas" <mdthomas AT mindspring.com>]

>
> The reason is simple-- when companies are free to compete on open
standards
> consumers benefit because of the huge amount of new products and services
that
> result. When companies are forced out of a market by a monopoly, the
amount of
> investment in those areas are greatly reduced.

Another super nice thing about open standards -- they are more predictable.
HTTP
isn't going to change much b/c, for HTTP to change, a whole bunch of server
processes
and client processes all over the world have to "vote" for the change. The
de facto standard is
in the hands of the many, not the few. Proprietary standards are also quite
de facto
and in an ideal world can be predicted based on the context of corporate
goals -- i.e.,
what is best for the shareholders. But the managers of proprietary standards
ultimately
hold enough power to ruin things or, at least, make things very difficult
for their constituents,
and the feedback loops between managers and those effected are such that a
mistake can take
years before it is even deemed a mistake. E.g., many ASP sites will have to
recode every ASP
page to migrate up to ASP .NET. And then there are the Outlook security
concerns, etc.

Are open standards perfect? Of course not. But the way the standards are
decided upon --
the de facto standards, not whatever someone typed up for w3c -- is
fundamentally different.
IMHO, it is much more organic and has dynamic, fluid and speedy feedback
loops. The most
powerful of all: the users and implementers can simply vote "no" on a very
granular basis.

I'd rather base career and business decisions on open standards and how I
think they will
change over time rather than on proprietary standards that are in the hands
of a relatively
small number of decision-making entities. A lot of large corporations and
governments that
have grown upset with MS over the years feel the same way.

But... those same officials and executives take Otis elevators to their
offices every day with
little or no complaint. It isn't the company, or even whether or not the
company is a monopoly,
but rather how the standards develop and how they can (and are able to)
evolve.

If you can accurately guess how monopolies are going to behave, more power
to you. MS is a
powerful part of our landscape and I do everything I can to better
understand what they are up
to and how it effects us now and years down the road. And I'm also quite
fond of many of their
products.