But it has to be done right. It needs to be open and it needs to be completely standardized. None of this little cutesy "We'll tweak this just a bit to make it work 'better'". We don't care if it is the absolute best, we only need it to be good enough.

Right now, we're at the same point personal computers were before IBM came out with their DOS based PC. It was completely open and even though it wasn't technologically at the top of the heap, it was standard. Until the advent of the IBM PC we had the Tandy line that was completely closed, the Apple stuff that was mostly closed, and a hundred slightly different flavore of CP/M. The PC came along and folks at Compaq and Columbia jumped on the clone bandwagon. Big players like Tandy and DEC and a bunch of others thought they could make their flavor just a bit better by veering from the standard -- of course, their stuff would be just a bit proprietary. They were left in the dust-bin of history. Others like Apple, Atari, Commodore, Next, Sun, Apollo, BE, and finally the IBM PS2 (to name just a few) thought they could create a new standard that was way better, but closed were also discarded.

As for the little guys, times couldn't have been better. The standardization gave folks like Lotus, Satellite Software (Word Perfect), Novell, PFS, and thousands more; a platform to develop to and they created a thriving market where nothing existed before.

A true standard that is 'good enough' always benefits everyone that adopts or uses it.