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"Over the next 10-15 years, I predict that virtually all new standards will come from Europe," asserts Cutter Consortium Fellow Tom DeMarco.

In the latest issue of Cutter Consortium's Business Technology Trends and Impacts Opinion, the Cutter Business Technology Council, along with Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants Tom Welsh and Borys Stokalski, debate the European Union's future as a standards-setting superpower.

According to Cutter Consortium Fellow Tom DeMarco, "America's brief stint as the world's only economic superpower enabled it to establish a set of unwritten rules governing all of world commerce. One of those rules, for example, concerned Windows. It wasn't the US government that established this rule, but rather the sudden convergence of US IT organizations, acting in concert to make a de facto standard. The rest of the world followed. In this case, it was the 'invisible hand' of the market that established the standard, but that's not the only way that standards get effected. I predict that the EU will now begin to undo that standard and will achieve its end as effectively as it denied the merger of GE and Honeywell. It won't happen instantly, but it will happen. It's already begun with the European public sector moving to Linux. Europe has always viewed Microsoft as a kind of US tax on European IT. Acting against this kind of foreign taxation will, I predict, be politically easy for the EU, once it gets started. Once the surge begins in Europe, US companies will follow suit."

"I agree with Tom that the emergence of the EU bureaucracy has had a measurable impact on US business, but it is plausible to me that one day in the not-so-distant future, a US corporation will thumb its nose at an EU sanction because the bulk of its business is coming from India and China. This US corporation will not be Microsoft, however, because India and China are already busy gearing up to defend against an assault from Fort Redmond, and South America isn't big enough," says Cutter Consortium Fellow Lou Mazzucchelli.

"I find it hard to believe that 'virtually all new standards will come from Europe.' Recently I have been tracking the progress of Web services standards. Of roughly 100 such specifications, only a handful has anything to do with Europe. Most were drafted or heavily influenced by US corporations such as BEA, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Sun. The leading software standards consortia include ANSI, ECMA, IETF, ISO, OASIS, OMG, and W3C. All but two of these are US-based. ISO is based in Europe but has a global remit; while ECMA, by far the least important, is the only distinctively European one," says Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant and lifelong UK resident Tom Welsh.

"Certainly the EU is famous for its obsession with standardizing and certifying everything. But it is hardly provable that defining (and complying with) such extensive regulation improves creativity or agility. If a management discipline -- such as material resource planning -- becomes routinized, it ceases to deliver competitive advantage. So even if the US has to adopt European standards, my feeling is that in doing so, it will just outsource the task of routinizing less significant aspects of life and the economy. And this work will be financed by European taxpayers. With its tremendous growth potential, the Asian market is likely to ignore any standards that don't create value and also give real exposure to de facto standards that spur growth and productivity. GSM might be a European success, but the success of Japanese third-generation telephony (DoCoMo) has not yet been replicated in either Europe or the US," says Borys Stokalski, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant, cofounder and principal of Cutter-affiliated, Poland-based Infovide SA.

To schedule an interview with any of the Council members or Senior Consultants, contact .

More information about Cutter Business Technology Council members is available at http://www.cutter.com/trends/trendsmethod.html.

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