Stardate 20010717.0959 (On Screen): This article tries to contend that Microsoft's "standard" isn't
really a standard because real standards come out of industry bodies and are created by consensus. His problem is that he's confusing means and ends.
The purpose of a standard is interoperability. It's true that many interoperable standards are created by standards bodies, but a lot of standards are created by single corporations. Sometimes those standards get published by standards bodies, but sometimes they're simply published by those companies. (And sometimes they're not published at all.) Back when the Bell System still existed, a lot of industry standards were actually created by Bell. For instance, the one-time blazingly fast 1200 baud modem (don't laugh, I loved mine when it was new) was based on Bell 212, a standard issued by Bell Labs. If there was any industry feedback into the development of Bell 212, I never heard of it.
He says "True standards are approved by standards organizations like the IEEE, W3C, and ISO." No. True standards are widely used in a consistent fashion. That's all that's important. It doesn't matter where the standard comes from. (It also doesn't matter if it's only used by products from one company, if those products are very widely used.) There are a lot of standards which have come out of IEEE or ANSI or ISO which are completely useless because they've never been widelyused, whereas there are a lot of broadly-used standards which came directly from companies. Like it or not, a Windows .DOC file is a standard. (discuss)
