While the pace of business change is never slow, many observers note that the current economic downturn, far from slowing the pace of innovation, is certain to increase the pace of change within many sectors. The growing attention given to "cloud computing" is one example of economic constraints driving such change.

In recent a post, I promised I'd address the relationship between standards and APIs. A broad assertion that I believe holds up fairly well, is that standards are not APIs, but that ideally good standards figure into what makes a good API. As I write this post, I notice that IBM's Bob Sutor has put up a post on his blog describing issues with the proliferation of APIs that fall short on measures of "compatibility," "interoperability," or "interchangeability." Bob writes:

With cloud computing becoming more and more important, people are correctly asking questions about standards. My sense is that virtually none of the cloud environments are interchangeable and that interoperability among them is sketchy, at best. Unless one provider ends up being overwhelmingly dominant, interoperability will need to be improved.

Many would agree that standards potentially have a very important role to play in leveraging capabilities from the cloud. However, many also would agree that there are significant obstacles to realizing anything like standards-based cloud computing.

The Challenge for Standards Development Organizations