I love standards. And, any given month, I can count on some entity in the storage community to announce, propose, or ratify a storage standard. The current situation reminds me of the "font wars" of the mid-80s when Apple and Microsoft confronted Adobe's dominance in the font marketplace. One type vendor after another trooped to Redmond to spill the secrets of fine fontography. The result—TrueType—is certainly good technology and the equal of PostScript, but today the systems coexist. And users benefit.

Sto...