Relevant link of today: Standards and Interoperability

There is an interesting article on Information Week published yesterday about Standardisation and Interoperability. It touches on many interesting aspects around standards and interoperability, including:

• the issue of proprietary extensions as a potential threat to interoperability;
  
• the benefit of voluntary interoperability testing in addition to implementing the standard;
• the importance of standards in new and hot IT areas like cloud computing - with a discussion of the recently published Open Cloud Manifesto of which IBM is co-author and signatory;
  
• a discussion about document format standards;
• a clear statement that having competing standards is no benefit at all.
  

The article is definitely worth a read. Please see it at Information Week:

"Standards Matter: The Battle For Interoperability Goes On
We all say we want our gear to work together, but are you willing to hold vendors accountable for breaking faith?

Used to be, vendors didn't brazenly fracture standards. Sure, they sought lock-in opportunities, but most knew that if they played too fast and loose, the market would mete out punishment, as in the '90s when TCP/IP rule breakers lost sales.
[...] "