In previous posts to this site, I have been harping about the fact that the IT industry has been unwilling or unable to move to open systems standards across the board and has been insisting on locking customers into proprietary solutions in order to maximize profit. In other words – the vendors have been in control! This has been the pattern for the last 30 years in IT.
Having read a few articles lately about where the major vendors appear to be moving, I am slowly becoming convincedthat there is hope on the horizon after all.
If I can believe what I am reading, the HP/Compaq merger, for example, may be the result of their respective managements believing that customers are now taking control of the industry (finally!) and are demanding end-to-end standards-based enterprise applications, application interconnectivity, and integrated shared data. If the appropriate international standards existed, all of these goals would be achievable at much less cost and effort than today. Application development and integration are engineering processes and demand uniform standards, and it would appear that we may finally be moving in that direction.
Power to the customers!
