Microsoft's responce to XML.com article

[Lee Anne Phillips]

I'm well aware that Tim Bray is not the problem and indeed is part of at 
least one possible solution in another area. His words occasioned the 
thought rather than being something I felt I should reply to as in 
disagreeing with his words. Quite the contrary, I agree completely with 
what he said.

They *are* starved for resources, but they're starved because the glacial 
process serves corporate sponsors well at the expense of the community.

I've been on standards bodies in other fields, and the level of actual 
participation was sometimes laughable. Although my company was quite 
willing to send me off to the meetings, at huge expense, once I got home 
the party was over and it was back to work on corporate business. If I 
managed to do a little work on standards body business over my lunch hour, 
that was fine by them but no one really cared as long as we could say that 
we were *involved*.

What you say is true, it's an enormous commitment of time and money when 
viewed from our small company viewpoints, but full membership means your 
company grosses fifty million dollars a year or more. A few hundreds of 
thousands of dollars in overhead is chicken feed to a company of the size 
that most full members are. It's well worth the cost to make sure that your 
viewpoint is taken into account on the topics that matter to you. It's 
probably worth the cost just to have the opportunity to delay developments 
one doesn't like as well.

At Sunday 1/16/00 07:29 PM -0500, David Megginson wrote:
>Actually, the W3C XML Activity actively recruits invited experts who
>do not work for member companies, including Tim Bray, the person
>you're replying to, though I agree that's not the same as a real open process.


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