Randhir Reddy Muddam

Open Standards: The Harbinger for Innovation

Open standards, absence of which has stymied Innovation for over a decade, is beginning to gain traction, with Internet coming to the rescue of Innovators.

With Major players viz. Apple, Oracle, SAP which shied away from Standards, are the new poster children.

A case in point, Open Document Format, is an attempt to make it platform agnostic, which will make sharing documents a lot easier for users. Microsoft is not supporting Open Document Format in its upcoming Office 12, fearing losing control on the proprietary .doc format, tantamount to “holding Microsoft users to ransom, would be an understatement. The decision of Massachusetts State to embrace Open Document as the only document standard, is a good beginning.

The overwhelming success of the GSM standard in Mobile Phones, which is a non-proprietary technology, as opposed to CDMA, owned by Qualcomm, only proves the players liking for the Open Standard, GSM.

The Internet standards body, W3C, has set Technology Standards for the Web Viz. HTML, XML, CSS, Scripting etc.. which has led to massive adoption and popularity of Internet, for new generation Applications, with the Web becoming the de facto platform.

On the Web, HTML is the de facto standard. "And XML will do to Data, what HTML has done to the UI", as aptly pointed by Adam Bosworth. With RSS, XForms, XSL will greatly help the New Internet age Applications . HTML stood the test of time, as the standard UI for the Internet. which spawned explosion of Applications in Web 2.0 space.

The pace for Standards, will only increase exponentially, once companies realize the coming revolution of The Internet Era.

posted by Randhir Reddy @ 9.3.06