Joel Spolsky recently published a very insightful piece called "Martian Headsets" (also posted here on fsdaily). The core of his article is about the standards compliance of the upcoming Internet Explorer 8. IE8 presents a problem because, although it is pretty standards compliant, it renders a lot of websites quite badly.

"We've just launched the splash page for the new Email Standards Project website at email-standards.org, which is the future location of a lot of news and resources relating to our push for consistent, reliable web standards support for email..."

Is lack of standards compliance an anti-trust issue? The Opera folks think so. Yesterday, the Norwegian browser-maker submitted an anti-trust complaint against Microsoft to the European Commission.

Some commenters think I was unfair to IBM in my last post. There I took Big Blue to task for its announcement that it intends to wage war against Microsoft in the world’s standards bodies

IBM declared in a new corporate policy that it was establishing new IT standards and redefining its ties with the International Standards Organization (ISO). If developing countries want to develop their own standards, IBM is willing to support them. Ramifications are clear regarding the turbulent debate around acceptance of Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) data format.

Industry has always depended on standards and traditional industries have built their standards as part of a slow, controlled, top-down approach to innovation. Industrial-age standards are often heavily patented, complex, and large. They can be expensive to implement and therefore are implementable only for large established firms.

This week the Dutch government will discuss a proposal to switch as much as possible to open standards and open source software. The Microsoft director for the Netherlands, Theo Rinsema, responded that Microsoft is not objecting to open standards, but the proposal excludes too many not open standards, like PDF, MP3 and GSM, which are widely accepted standards.

Bob Sutor discusses the effect of open source and open standards on innovation and markets. Specific topics include the effects of open source alternatives on software markets, open standards and interoperability, the new social aspect of software and the open source community.

13 members of the TC in Norway has left their Standards Body in protest. They say that the Standards Body has lost its credibility in the IT area. Remember that Standards Norway was voting Yes with the support of only 2 companies (Microsoft and Statoil), and against the will of the rest of the technical committee.