The World Wide Web Consortium has been meeting to develop new standards for Web services, but Microsoft and IBM have chosen not to participate in the meeting, despite then being two of the biggest proponents of Web services.
The meeting is considering how business processes can be automated through Web services, particularly involving the use of XML to allow for important software to be modelled and developed within an organisation.
People taking part in the push to create standards fear the lack of participation from MS and IBM could mean there will be competing and incompatible proposals for standards developed. It has been speculated that the W3C"s use of patents and it"s royalty policy are the reasons why these major companies have kept away.
The head of the working group which is holding the meeting has stated that "Personally I think (IBM and Microsoft are) shooting themselves in the foot".