In a sign of growing discord over Web services guidelines, Microsoft has pulled out of a key Web services standards working group.
Over the past month, IBM and Microsoft have been at odds with other companies around standards submissions, including a high-profile effort within the Web"s leading standards organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Now Microsoft has upped the rancor by dropping out of a W3C working group focused on establishing rules for how businesses will send and receive data to one another via Web services.
The company withdrew from the W3C"s so-called choreography group because it determined that the scope of the group did not align well with the work of two Microsoft researchers who attended the initial meeting, said Steven VanRoekel, director of Web services marketing for Microsoft.
He added that the W3C "is not the only vehicle in which to impact and evaluate a set of technologies."