Goten Xiao

South England

Programmer

I've yet to see benefits from Microsoft. They elbow people out all the time, simply because "Everyone uses Microsoft, we have to use Microsoft to be compatible."

Interoperability isn't the key.

A common protocol that everyone uses and implements the same way is.

Example: HTML. It's a standard, but there are many different implementations of it. Microsoft have one, Netscape another, etc etc.

TCP/IP is more like it; everyone uses it, everyone uses the same protocol, everyone implements it in the same way (circuitry doesn't count as long as the end result is the same).

Now, VoIP is a standard, correct? So all we need is a common implementation from Microsoft, Sun, HP, Cisco, whoever.

It's like saying "We can't use bolt X because nut Y has one thread at the end that is 2mm out." If everyone made bolts and nuts to a standard, and used the same implementation, there wouldn't be a problem because everything would work together without any modification.