Tales from the frontiers of value subtraction by Doc Searls.  Doc on the music industry: "How insane does an industry have to be when it manages to screw its partners, its customers and its sources, all in one move?"  Dead on.  And how much longer can it continue to do business this way?

Microsoft ploy to block Sun exposed. Evidence indicates that Microsoft executives, including Chairman Bill Gates, sought to steer the direction of a Web services standards body away from rival Sun. [CNET News.com]

This is some ugly politics.  Here's the way Microsoft refers to its WS-I participation in high-level internal documents: "Foo gives us air cover for both de facto implementation adoption and our next wave of standards in this space."

And here's how they're spinning it in their court disposition: "We and IBM... wanted to make sure that that work (through the WS-I) was really open to multiple operating systems, multiple programming languages, etc...not a direction we expected Sun to be enthusiastic about since they see the whole world as being written in the Java language."

Heh.  But don't worry too much.  The Open Source software developers driving Web Services value interoperability, and that's no spin.  Worried that the Open Source folks won't get representation?  Worry not.  IBM trusts the Open Source community more than it trusts Microsoft or Sun.