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Trade associations setting standards are highly overrated. And a lot of the standards that get set are pretty open even if proprietary. Everybody making word processing software can get a hold of the Word doc standard and can open and save Word docs if they really want to.

It might be easier (it usually takes more than just compiler options, you've got to do some heavy rewriting to port something to another system) but there's not reason to think they would do it. Look at how few pieces of software are available for both the Mac and PC, how many for either platform are written for Linux, there's no reason to think that if we had a wide open space with 3 or 4 standards like in the crazy old days more companies would write to all the standards than did before or do now.

I'm not into open source. I see why it's attractive from some standpoints but I believe in propieretary closed off systems. I would never work for a company that did open source, the software might be better but if you don't own the keys you don't own the house.

There's still competition even with winners. Netscape came 2 bad decisions away from making the desktop OS immaterial. Linux is coming on strong as serious competition for the desktop OS. That's the great part about business, no victory is permanent, there's always somebody else willing to go against you and they might even win.