Floor Lamps are Not Software
IBM's Rob Weir wrote a nice piece about the standardization of electrical fixtures and the benefits those standards bring to consumers.
In fact, far from constraining choice, standards enable greater choice. Because the basic plugs, receptors and connectors are governed by standards, these core components have become commodities and are produced off-shore at low cost to you, the consumer. This causes lighting designers and manufacturers to compete on the basis of style, elegance, utility and features. So standards result in lower cost, greater competition and greater choice for the consumer.
Rob is certainly right that core electrical components have become commodities, which is why the outlets in a fifty year old house generally work fine with modern, stylized floor lamps. That's a good thing, especially since electricity hasn't changed much in recent memory. Safety and materials have certainly improved, but electricity itself remains pretty much the same.
Of course, there is more than one electrical socket standard in common use. While floor lamps work fine in common sockets, high power appliances such as dryers and cooking ranges require a more robust socket. Hence, NEMA 14-30 and 14-50 receptacles.
Clearly, a one size standard does not fit all.
Rob then equates electrical standards with document formats.
It is the same thing with document formats. Consumers don't want to worry about document formats. They don't want to even think about document formats. They just want them to work, invisibly, without problems. Of course consumers want choice, but it is the choice of applications, choice of features, choice of vendors, choice of support options, choice of open source versus proprietary source, choice of heavy weight versus web-based, a choice of buying a single application versus buying a suite, etc. A single universal file format is what makes these other choices possible, just like a choice of the Medium Edison Screw bulb leads to an affordable choice in lamp designs.
The problem is that software standards, which are generally concerned with software interoperability, are different than electrical standards, which govern physical objects. In the physical world, end users might need to use cumbersome physical converters to bridge US and European power socket standards (which, while inconvenient, enables interoperability). With software, applications can support multiple standards and can even translate between those standards in ways that are invisible to end users.
The iPod supports the AAC, MP3, Audible, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV audio standards. In the document space, OpenOffice supports multiple formats including RTF, XHTML, and the OASIS Open Document Format. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz is even promoting the ability for documents created in Google's office to be "trivially" exported to OpenOffice and notes the coming availability of a plugin that enables Word to use the ODF document format.
Rob's equating a single electrical standard with his call for a single universal file format also misses an important point. Electricity is a largely mature and stable technology and there is not much room for innovation in the socket and receptacle space. Document formats, on the other hand, are constantly evolving to keep pace with changing technology. Competition is vital to ensure that those formats continue to meet those ever changing needs. Imagine if a single document format was adopted 15 years ago. How would that format deal with things that we take for granted today like including links to web pages, adding digital photos, or even embedding video in our documents? Unlike electricity, document formats are evolving at a rapid pace and competition will help drive that innovation.
IBM wants to prevent that competition. It is actively trying to prevent ISO/IEC JTC1 from even considering the ECMA Open XML standard. Rather than let the marketplace decide which standardized format is best for a particular purpose, IBM wants to remove that choice. To go back to Rob Weir's electrical fixture example, in IBM's world, as long as there is a standard socket for a floor lamp, there is simply no place for a competing standard that is better suited to high powered appliances like dryers.
DRM and Approaches to Interoperability
Steve Jobs made headlines recently with his "Thoughts on Music." While a great deal has been written about Jobs offering to embrace the distribution of DRM free music, I thought his comments on interoperability were interesting. In Jobs' view, interoperability is achieved through licensing Apple's FairPlay to 3rd party device manufacturers. Microsoft has taken a very different approach to DRM interoperability.
First, Microsoft licenses its WMDRM platform to third parties for implementation on a wide variety platforms and services. Contrary to Jobs' assertion that maintaining DRM security is "near impossible" when the technology is licensed to third parties, third party implementations of WMDRM have proven to be fairly robust and the ecosystem has responded quickly to the inevitable breaches.
In addition to licensing, DRM interoperability can also be accomplished by design. Today Microsoft introduced Microsoft PlayReady, its next generation of content protection technology. PlayReady is already interoperable with DTCP, CPRM, and Helix DRM as a result of agreements between Microsoft and the entities behind those content protection systems. Moreover, 3rd parties can nominate other DRM systems and content protection technologies and request that Microsoft provide a “mapping” into that system. Once the mapping is established, content services can determine whether to allow their content to flow into that 3rd party system.
This multi-tiered approach allows services and device manufacturers to decide whether or not they want to provide DRM interoperability, and if they do, how they want to enable that interoperability. For example, if Apple wanted FairPlay to interoperate with PlayReady, we've got a couple of options for them to pick from.