Micro Standards: preparing for global participation

The global marketplace demands quicker, cheaper standards development. The preparations by the IEEE standards writing community to ready itself for global participation makes for an exciting and timely topic. Nowhere on this globe is there a single standards-developing body, I believe, that is not reviewing its international relationships. No matter what our country of origin, we all must realize that the customers of our standards systems now require products that can respond to the pressures of the international marketplace. Standards developers can no longer ignore this broader marketplace, any more than can those who buy and sell there. Indeed, it would be harmful, even shameful were we not to capitalize on the tremendous strengths our industry has already demonstrated. For example, here in North America, our industry faces global competition even when only doing business at home; North American borders, for the most part, are transparent to the movement of goods and services from other countries. Thus, the same forces driving the telecommunications and information technologies industries to think globally will drive the rest of industry to do likewise. Our future standards must reflect those realities. We must prepare ourselves, and we must take the lead