David: thanks for an interesting read.

Time is of the essence, move & move fast, practical & working over perfect, multiple competing solutions, the best solution wins. That's what got the OSS World to #1. Quite different from how the SDO's operate.

I don't see how the ITU-T will ever gain relevance again. To the OSS world they seem like bureaucrats defending old world interests and business models which are no longer viable in todays world. ETSI definitely needs to pick up the pace too. NFV is only inching forward but that's hardly surprising given the interests.

I like Neil's comment about just getting things done so the customer has a working solution and then drive standardization. Look at WebRTC. Who needs ITU-T, ETSI or even the IETF when you have a bunch of aligned parties driving innovation at furious pace with W3C standardizing it along the way. WebRTC will further pile on the Service Provider "losses" from OTT apps like WhatsApp.

Maybe the problem is not the SDO's but the parties represented in these SDO's. Everybody knows that change is inevitable and that it needs to be embraced or else, right? But a quick reality suggests quite the opposite. Meanwhile the OSS world will eat the world with its software making the SDO's all but relevant.