OSNews

"Yet they don't really innovate much. They implement existing technologies, hijack standards and market the hell out of there products. (Exchange, Terminal Services, Active Directory, MS-SQL -- nothing innovative here, tweak it, rebrand it). "

I like this part the most, because this is another problem I have. What really is a standard, is it something a governing body sets forth or is it something that everybody adopts. I tend to lean twords the latter because if nobody is using your so called standard it is not much of a standard is it. Because I could create a standard called TCP/IP-2 where all bits are inversed when sent over a LAN, but if nobody is using it for communication over the internet and they are all using TCP/IP, what kind of communication standard is it? Answer, it's not one because nobody uses it.

Now if Microsoft decides that they don't like something from the W3C such as a couple tags in HTML and they don't include it in IE, and they include others such as IFrame. What is the standard for HTML now, is it the W3C standard that only has about 10% of the population using it to it's fullest or is it the other 90% of the population? Now this is a real life example because back in the day of HTML 3.2 there was no IFrame in the definition of the standard but IE had one. Also IE had not Blink tag, and this pissed off alot of Netscape users. But if you look at what the XHTML standard has and the HTML 4.01 standard has they both of a IFrame tag, but no Blink tag.

Now you may be scraching your head saying how can this be, you mean the W3C "standards board" incorporated IFrame? Yes not because they wanted to but because they had to because 90% of the market supported it and it was being used in their so called HTML "standard". Because IFrame was a standard part of the majority of the users on the planet.

The word "standard" gets thrown around alot but we all have to remember, standard is in the process that gets used the most, by the most people. If this wasn't true we would all still be using UNIX and communicating by dial up BBS's.