IBM Declares War on Standards Process

I had missed this last week when it first came out, but IBM has essentially declared war on the technical standards process. The words seem supportive enough, but when you read between them, you can see that a systematic round of arm-twisting is likely about to happen.

Anyone who knows tech is used to the dance that standard setting is. Experts from various companies serve on the committees, each with a sense of what ought to work "best" and trying to wrangle decisions in their direction. This is competitive dominance in action and the stakes are high. That's what makes Big Blue's more-collegial-than-thou stance so amusing, with the following "tenets":

• Begin or end participation in standards bodies based on the quality and openness of their processes, membership rules, and intellectual property policies.
• Encourage emerging and developed economies to both adopt open global standards and to participate in the creation of those standards.
• Advance governance rules within standards bodies that ensure technology decisions, votes, and dispute resolutions are made fairly by independent participants, protected from undue influence.
• Collaborate with standards bodies and developer communities to ensure that open software interoperability standards are freely available and implementable.
• Help drive the creation of clear, simple and consistent intellectual property policies for standards organizations, thereby enabling standards developers and implementers to make informed technical and business decisions.

• If things go in a direction that we don't like, we're taking our ball and going home.
• We want to sell everywhere.
• Please, let's keep the other players at bay.
• We want to sell everywhere.
• No one ever got in trouble for buying IBM.