No, that is not necessarily the case. One only need to look at how MS has (mis-)treated established protocol and file format standards, such as NetBIOS, HTML, and CSS (...and, those are just the ones I've had direct experience using, where MS's "implementation" of the standard completely broke everything except MS products. Now, you want to hand them another standard to bastardize?? Fine. Just don't be surprised when the MS product line is the only one that works with the "standard" produced by the MS product.


footnotes, for those interested:

1) The only NetBIOS call implemented in the "Microsoft Networking for Novell Networks" was the (positive) response to the "is netbios installed/operational" call. MSFNN responded to that call with affirmation that the complete NetBIOS suite was enabled. As such, you couldn't use any application that actually -depended- on NetBIOS, unless you replaced the MNFNN drivers with Novell's Client32 for Microsoft Windows" (which properly implemented NetBIOS). Microsoft didn't see this as an issue, because it helped them drive Novell (the networking leader, at the time) nearly out of the business.

2) HTML pages created in MS FrontPage would look fine in IE, but not render properly in Netscape (which was, at the time, the leading web browsing software [and, by a long shot! IE was a distant 4th!!]). MS pretended it must be a Netscape problem (and not a FrontPage problem), because things looked just fine in their browser, IE. It turns out that FrontPage was forgetting to put </table> tags at the end of their tables, and rather than fix that, they patched IE to "assume" the end of the table and render the page anyway. Netscape (and every other sane HTML browser/interpreter!) simply followed the HTML specifications, which clearly state that any incomplete container (such as, for instance, a table) should be ignored and not rendered. Well, you see who won that battle, don't you?