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Can you play the standards game? The real drivers behind Web services standardization. (XML In Transit).

Article Excerpt
Call me a cynic, but I don't think companies participate in standards development out of altruism. Enterprises are in the business of making their products and technologies successful. In an increasingly interconnected technology landscape, standards are the keys to interoperability.

Applying gross oversimplification, we can identify four types of players in the standards game: leads, coleads, followers, and bystanders. The category within which a company falls typically can hint at its goals in the standards game and can predict its behavior.

Leads need to effect change in the industry. The motivation could be offensive or defensive. Offensive change can help expand the business into new areas. Standards often enable the creation of new markets by gathering a critical mass of industry support and minimizing integration friction. Standards leaders can affect the shape of the future. For the price of heavier investment in the standards game they get the benefits of being perceived as innovators and having the inside track on how to evolve their own products and technologies.

Sometimes platform leaders use standards to simply increase the cost of competition by defining yet another thing that competitors need to comply with. Defensive standards leadership is primarily motivated by one of three forces:

* Building a coalition against one or more competitors

* Changing the rules of the game (changing the perception of what is of real value)

* Stalling the standards process to let internal product development catch up

Coleads are businesses that don't have the power to change the industry themselves but want to place bets on how the future will look. In offensive mode these companies are in the business of quickly implementing standards and sometimes providing value-add on top of them. This is the familiar embrace-and-extend model. More established companies tend to associate new standards with their existing product offerings in a meaningful way. Some startups tend to make standards the...

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