To most people, the setting of technology standards sounds like an arcane and generally dull pursuit best left to the experts. But tech companies have long realised that influencing the standard-setting process can bring big competitive advantage: getting your technology preference adopted by the world at large brings immediate home-field advantage.
Which is why the new row that IBM is trying hard to whip up over international standards is so important.
Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards, tells me that Large Blue has decided to cast a cold eye over the performance of the standards bodies it belongs to - which number “several hundred” - and might drop its links to some. The process of creating standards is “much more broken than people realised”, he said: in particular, there is a lack of transparency in some bodies about how decisions are arrived at or even how membership of the standards groups is set, which opens the system to abuse.
The immediate cause of all this, of course, was Microsoft’s successful and controversial promotion of its Ooxml (Office Open XML) formats as a standard earlier this year. The formats first got the backing of Ecma, which put them forward for approval by the ISO - a process that drew complaints about how Microsoft packed national standards bodies with its own supporters in order to tip the ISO vote in its favour.
“It has exposed how Ecma operates, as basically a standards body for hire,” complains Mr Sutor, who is pretty direct in his warning that if Ecma does not clean up its act, IBM will quit. (Plastered across the top of Ecma’s Website is the proud claim, “Standards@Internet Speed”. They might want to rethink that one.)
Mr Sutor insists this isn’t just a Microsoft-induced sulk. He points to other companies of whose practices IBM disapproves. These include Rambus and Qualcomm, each of which he accused of steering standards in their own favour without first revealing that they already had proprietary technology in the area.
Will IBM’s public threats have any effect? Much depends on how well it has read the mood in the emerging world. There were various complaints from emerging countries earlier this year about the Ooxml process. This month the rumblings got much louder, as a group of six mainly South American countries wrote an open letter to ISO saying that after the Ooxml debacle they will no longer adopt all of the body’s standards as a matter of course.
Siding with these customers looks like a smart business move for IBM. The risk, though, is that if a big vendor unilaterally starts to abandon some standards bodies, or to end support for the technologies they’ve recognised, it could lead to a fragmentation that’s helpful to no one.
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