IBM's Sutor zings ZDNet blog entry

In responding to Marc Wagner's blog (see Don't sacrifice innovation in push for standards), IBM's vice president of open standard and open source Bob Sutor writes:

...I think we need to ask two important questions. The first is "When is the right time to produce a community-created standard to help solve a certain problem?" and I'll assume Marc had this in mind. The second is "I think I'm doing something really innovative here, but what open standards should I build upon to improve interoperability and the chance for greater adoption?"....... Standards can allow innovation by providing a strong underlying foundation on which to build the new ideas. Do standards themselves need to be innovative? No, but they can lead to innovation downstream. Can waiting too long to create open standards hinder innovation? Absolutely, if de facto standards force or convince people not to try to innovate in certain areas. So please don't simply say "standards might hinder innovation." That's overly simplistic and doesn't take into account how things evolve over time.