Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Others Form Huge Standards Consortium

Some of the world's biggest high-tech companies -
and some of the largest corporate egos - today said they are forming a
consortium designed to arrive at a set of unified technology and
business standards for e-commerce.

Microsoft Corp., Intel, IBM, Compaq, Dell and about two dozen other
companies all are members of the new industry group, dubbed the
"Business Internet Consortium." The group, which has held unpublicized
steering committee meetings over the past several months, will address
such issues as security; use of extensible markup language (XML) by
traditional businesses; integration of existing business systems with
new e-commerce systems; addressing network latency, and the like.

These issues are among the biggest faced by traditional businesses
making the leap to e-commerce, said Seth Walker, a spokesman for
consortium member Intel Corp.

"What we're looking to do with the consortium is look across the entire
industry to provide a vision that's really going to connect the dots
for which standards and technologies are most applicable for business
managers and IT (information technology) managers," Walker said.
"There are so many technologies and standards and interests in the
e-business marketplace, and everybody is trying to get their company
to convert over to using e-business practices. But everybody is
doing it differently."

He said the consortium will serve as a central point where businesses
can get together and talk about what's working, what's not and
how to apply certain technologies to get companies onto the Web.
"Not only is it just talking about applying to companies," he said,
"but it's talking about a broader vision and strategy for the
growth of e-business."

Walker pointed to projections from the Gartner market research
firm that suggest global e-business will reach $7 trillion in revenue
by 2004. However, he said, "The industry is not going to get there
unless everyone is talking to one another. So we need more forums
where people can come together, continue to grow the overall
marketplace for e-commerce. And, of course, that just leads to
broader growth."

However, while the consortium on its face appears to be a wise idea,
Gartner Research Director Whit Andrews expressed doubts about the
project, simply because of its massive size and the abundance of
competing egos involved.

"This consortium faces remarkable challenges, because it involves the
biggest egos in technology, and it seeks to address quite disparate
issues," Andrews said. "Without a question, the culture clash will
be mighty."

Even if successful, he said, the group will require tremendous time
and attention from all the companies involved. "(Even) a failed
consortium requires a fair amount of time and work," he said. "But
if you're going to succeed as a multi-vendor consortium with
presumed rivalry among the membership, it's going to require enormous
amounts of labor, in the corporations that are involved, to justify
and manage their relationship."

Intel's Walker expressed no such worry.

"If you look across the history of the industry, it's always more
positive to be inclusive rather than exclusive," he said. "The interests
of many are best represented in an open forum where issues can be
worked out, rather than solving individual pieces in an individual forum."

It will create more work, he said, and it won't be easy to wade through
the thousands of technical issues in need of solution. Nonetheless, he
said, "Ultimately, those forums seem to be more productive."

But there are problems beyond simply making it work, Andrews points
out. If successful, the group - comprising as it does some of the
high-tech industry's most staunch competitors - could eventually
attract the attention of federal regulators worried about price
fixing or industry collusion.

"Success could move it into the legal arena," Andrews said. "Certainly,
when you have substantial competitors agreeing to collaborate you raise
a lot of lawyers' antennae. The key issue here though is the issue of
whether it would be designed to drive any kind of pricing collusion or
power collusion. Right now, its stated goal is not to do that."

On balance, Andrews said, the idea could be characterized as a good
one. The challenge, he said, will be simply to make it work.

"I think it will all be in the execution," he said. "I think that the
greatest
challenge will not come right now but in its ability to address smaller
issues."
He pointed to simple work calendar interoperability, which has plagued
business partnerships for years; Microsoft Outlook calendars, for
instance, so far have never been made compatible with Yahoo calendars.
And that's just one of thousands of headaches the group will have
to cure.

"Can the large group address small issue is the key question,"
Andrews said. He said it will take a number of months before the
answer is known.

"We might be able to assess a failure in six months," he said. "We
would not be able to access a success for at least 18 or 24 months."

Walker said that the consortium will begin forming working groups
by the first quarter of 2001, to begin hammering out solutions to
some of the issues the group plans to tackle.