To ALL: Does IBM even sell OS/2 anymore? Does anyone know? :-)
Jerry Feldman wrote:
On Tue, 04 Sep 2007 19:55:02 -0400
James Knott <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Not only that, but they've been blatantly cheating, to get it approved,
using, among other things, stuffing the the national commitees with
business partners, taking control of meetings and violating procedure
This is very true. It is not unusual for a market leader to try to
control standards. IBM did it with both the ANSI and CODASYL committees
years ago. In the US, the standards committees were vendor dominated,
and it was somewhat a case where each vendor certainly wanted some of
their pet features. Some vendors were on the committees just to gain
some intelligence, and others wanted their representatives to protect
their interests. In the case of relational database where I served on
the committee, the IBM representative was the editor. We started to go
down a somewhat obscure path until a few members decided that a lot of
work we had done was really too offbeat, and we reset the standard back
to essentially the IBM Sequel model. Had we continued on our path, we
would have had a standard that no one would implement. By resetting
back to Sequel, we not only had an implementable standard, but we also
had one that was also the current defacto standard.
Microsoft, as the industry leader wants to be able to fully control the
document landscape. By not adopting ODF in their products and by
pushing a standard that they fully control gives them continued control
of the market.
We are at a crossroad today. Governments and businesses all over the
world want to standardize their documents. Will Microsoft propose a
reasonable change to ODF that meets their technical needs or will they
push for changes that subvert ODF. I suspect that it will be very
difficult for them to do that in the future as a result of the recent
issues in Europe.
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