I think the bulk of your work here is on track — one criticism I have had with CIOs in the past decade is that so few seemed to be “market farmers”, or understand what it requires to foster healthy competition, innovation, and sustainability for their own investments. Of course notable exceptions exist, and consolidation isn’t controlled by CIOs — all the more reason for higher level strategy from customers.

The only issue I would raise here is that there does seem to be some confusion between the standards and open source. Open source has an agenda too, and it’s not always in the best interest of customers or the greater economy. I was one who coached groups back in the mid 90s on what they needed to do in order to pierce the enterprise market — at the time I didn’t see any short term alternative for competition — governments certainly weren’t acting in a responsible manner on regulation.

However, in the long-term, I have come to the conclusion that universal standards are necessary to prevent just what you correctly fear — while it’s true that standards bodies have challenges — one being terribly slow — another is having a business model that relies not on CIOs, but on vendors primarily — so I often suggest to enterprise customers that they need to take a more proactive approach in standards.

Essentially we have a utility now in networked computing — as with any other utility, it’s unacceptable for anyone to own the threads in plumbing or the plug ins — proprietary systems are fine for applications (electrical appliances), but not public transactions. That is simply setting up the same type of failed self regulatory situation we saw in finance leading to the crisis.

High end software programming is near the top of human intellectual capital. We don’t want to erode the incentives or do away with compensation for external innovators — indeed I think it’s important that they work for the customer rather than any other agenda. After all the customers don’t give their products away for free– it requires income to keep interests aligned, and there is also the issue of internal conflicts within the IT departments in some organizations — in the government for example I have seen open source simply used as another excuse to grow the empire — not the mission of the organizations– and no one has a more important responsibility than farming markets than the government. .02

Thanks for the blog.