Keith Teare, the founder and CEO of RealNames, has posted a big whine to his Web site because Microsoft killed his company. Anyway, here’s the part that was most obviously problematic:

Indeed, I believe that innovation on the Internet can no longer be purely “standards driven”. This is because the scale of the internet makes it impossible to distribute standards without the support of applications. This fact places a new responsibility on the application – the responsibility for deciding what is and what is not a standard.

My friends, we’re dealing with a real idiot here. To provide details, innovation on the Internet was never standards driven. If you look at just about everything on the Internet that was really successful, it was driven by implementation rather than by the standards processes. Application developers have always had the responsibility of deciding where they will adhere to standards and where they will strike out on their own.