[Ygor]

Particularly interesting should be the part about design by committee.

Remove Corba references, and it might apply to many other past and current pieces of technology:

"There are no entry qualifications to participate in the standardization process. Some contributors are experts in the field, but, to be blunt, a large number of members barely understand the technology they are voting on. This repeatedly has led to the adoption of specifications with serious technical flaws."

“Vendors respond to RFPs even when they have known technical flaws. This may seem surprising. After all, why would a vendor propose a standard for something that is known to suffer technical problems? The reason is that vendors compete with each other for customers and are continuously jostling for position. The promise to respond to an RFP, even when it is clear that it contains serious problems, is sometimes used to gain favor (and, hopefully, contracts) with users.”

[smhenderson]

I find this one to be very familiar as well. I'm sure we could come up with our own examples and combined have dozens or more.

"Vendors sometimes attempt to block standardization of anything that would require a change to their existing products. This causes features that should be standardized to remain proprietary or to be too vaguely specified to be useful. Some vendors also neglect to distinguish standard features from proprietary ones, so customers stray into implementation-specific territory without warning."