Standards : How much we need them ?

In response to the need for standards post from Apoorv, my take is

Standards are meant for products features that are no longer niche. Once they become commodity, standards are just small note that the products are compliant for so and so standard.

If one looks, you no longer buy Application Server for Java v1.5 vs v1.6 compliant (a very minor issue). You buy products for reasons other then standards. That means - What sells and differentiates products from each other is the features ( proprietary), inroads made by the development tools, ease of those development tools, documentation available for products/tools, expertise available in the market for those tools, ease of development and so on. Now, one can develop j2ee app's for WAS using eclipse. But developing j2ee app's for Weblogic on eclipse is not free and easy. IBM has a WAS CE ed for getting you hooked onto the eclipse platform. Once hooked, only way is to move up to WAS v6.x

Further, if everything was standard, lot of us will be rendered useless. Remember Y2K was a migration exercise for the very reason that there were no standards and everybody made money.