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TeleRead backed the creation of the Microsoft-inspired Open eBook organization, but still can’t understand the group’s inability to come up with a good e-book standard at the consumer level. Just what might happen if OEB actually showed some spunk and didn’t let Microsoft and the other ususal suspects get in the way? Well, one hint might be in the CNet news item below, which is dated March 25:

Microsoft breaks with standards effort

By Martin LaMonica
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
March 25, 2003, 4:00 AM PT

In a sign of growing discord over Web services guidelines, Microsoft has pulled out of a key Web services standards working group.

Over the past month, IBM and Microsoft have been at odds with other companies around standards submissions, including a high-profile effort within the Web’s leading standards organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Now Microsoft has upped the rancor by dropping out of a W3C working group focused on establishing rules for how businesses will send and receive data to one another via Web services.

The company withdrew from the W3C’s so-called choreography group because it determined that the scope of the group did not align well with the work of two Microsoft researchers who attended the initial meeting, said Steven VanRoekel, director of Web services marketing for Microsoft.

VanRoekel described the Microsoft research on “contract language,” which deals with ways two pieces of software communicate, as only partially related to the notion of automated business processes through Web services. He added that the W3C “is not the only vehicle in which to impact and evaluate a set of technologies.”

Earlier Microsoft participated in and backed an e-book conference at the National Institute for Standards and Technology. But that stopped. When you’re the biggest boy on the block and you don’t like the way the marble game is going, you can always take away your share of the marbles.

 
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