It is fair to say who wouldn’t want it “To Just Work”. But at what cost? If all products just worked what would be the differentiators between one product and another.

There are good reasons to work towards standards so there is a degree of interoperability but in reality how good is that interoperability.

What standards and commonality does do is gives the developers a common ground to communicate and learn. Products should continue to evolve and “Just work” better. But not at the cost of providing real improvements and benefits to functionality and performance.

Many years ago I worked on a project that used the Java Message Queue stuff. Functionally it just worked. But the reference implementation was not robust enough for an enterprise environment. In comes a 3rd party product that cost $6K per processor but had a ridiculous performance and scalability compared to the reference implementation. Yes to Phil’s point it did just work, which is good, but the different implementations had different optimizations. If they were exactly the same where is the differentiator that make one more valuable than the other. If they are different then they will have different ways to use them that can impact the developer.