Implementations vs. Implementations (And Why the Difference Matters)

“‘Military tacticians often bewail the havoc that the “fog of
war’ (i.e., the inability to communicate effectively amid the chaos
of the battlefield) wreaks on their carefully laid plans. I
sometimes feel the same way about the challenge of maintaining a
productive dialogue in highly competitive standards situations.
When the commercial stakes begin to rise, there too often seems to
be a greater desire to exchange verbal salvos than to actually
communicate. And it also becomes more tempting to be content with
generalizations than to try to get to the bottom of things to
figure out what’s really going on.

“About 10 days ago I tried to do a bit of fog cutting by posing
a few questions at Jason Matusow’s blog at the end of a post he had
titled Independent Implementations of Open XML. Jason does a
conscientious job of trying to answer all of the questions that
people leave at his blog, including those that are not exactly what
you’d call polite. In this case, Jason had listed six
implementations of OOXML, supplying the usual links to the sites of
the vendors in question…”

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