You are spot on. I was at Microsoft during one of these protocol discussions. I worked on a popular (and contentious) directory product for whom interoperability (or lack thereof) was the product's bread and butter. For the mid-2000 release we were embracing XML goodness from the W3C. XML was in style in the same way JSON is today. We settled on WS-Transfer and IBM's WS-ResourceTransfer extensions because, frankly, it didn't matter what we picked so long as it was XML.
Well, we worked on the release for 2 years and then 6 months before shipping our VP decides that decision posed too big of a risk for IBM gaining 'the upper hand.' He made a point of blaming people for the decision he had approved years ago. We then had to rip out a perfectly good and tested implementation of WS-ResourceTransfer, design a replacement, make it an industry standard, and finish with the original schedule. We came up with something 'different' called MS-WSTIM ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd302851.aspx -- fun fact, I got stuck writing most of those docs).
After the change our principal technical architect spent the next year going to conferences talking about the technical merits of how MS-WSTIM exceeds WS-ResourceTransfer in oh-so-many ways. He supposedly worked to convince minor players to adopt the new 'industry standard.'
The whole thing was a sham. MS-WSTIM is WS-ResourceTransfer by a different name. It just wasn't IBM's, and like so much at Microsoft, politics reigned supreme. I would be surprised if the same were not happening here.
Well, we worked on the release for 2 years and then 6 months before shipping our VP decides that decision posed too big of a risk for IBM gaining 'the upper hand.' He made a point of blaming people for the decision he had approved years ago. We then had to rip out a perfectly good and tested implementation of WS-ResourceTransfer, design a replacement, make it an industry standard, and finish with the original schedule. We came up with something 'different' called MS-WSTIM ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd302851.aspx -- fun fact, I got stuck writing most of those docs).
After the change our principal technical architect spent the next year going to conferences talking about the technical merits of how MS-WSTIM exceeds WS-ResourceTransfer in oh-so-many ways. He supposedly worked to convince minor players to adopt the new 'industry standard.'
The whole thing was a sham. MS-WSTIM is WS-ResourceTransfer by a different name. It just wasn't IBM's, and like so much at Microsoft, politics reigned supreme. I would be surprised if the same were not happening here.