The other issue, of course, is one of large organizations *wanting* standards to be complex. The more complex the standard (and the more BigCorp-patented technologies included in it of course!), the more resources it will take to fully implement it. The goal is to make the resources and patent licenses needed to fully implement the standard so onerously huge that only large organizations will have the resources to do so, meaning they are the only ones who are “standards-compliant” and they can slam any potential upstart competitors as not being “standards-compliant”. Not going to name names here, but I’ll just point out that simpler standards tend to drive out the more complex standards, thereby leaving the big companies high and dry with a product that nobody wants to buy. Has anybody here used the complex X.25 protocol lately? What, you’re using the simpler TCP/IP protocol instead? Exactly.

So you’re correct that this behavior isn’t even in the interest of large corporations, since it tends to create “standards” that nobody buys into, and a “standard” that nobody uses — or that only customers of a few large corporations use — is hardly a real standard. And keeping the standards discussions secretive is hardly in the best interests of anybody also, it means that real problems with “standards” will be overlooked until the “standard” is actually published, at which point all the effort used to produce the “standard” is useless because nobody will create products that implement the “standard” (thus rendering it *not* a standard). Yet we still see this sort of rent-seeking behavior on the part of certain large corporations that seem convinced that it actually works. Inexplicable…

I’ve been doing cloud development for four years, so I think I literally was cloud before it was cool. Having a standards process for cloud computing that is opaque to me is kind of like having my marriage arranged by complete strangers: it’s vitally important and unlikely to work out well for me.

I hope your appeal for involvement and transparency don’t fall on deaf ears.

Mitch

One reason why we don’t see people calling themselves “customers” in these groups is because the customers of cloud APIs are we, the large and small shops who use the cloud to build systems and applications – independent consultants included.

To expand on @lmacvittie’s comment :
Users use Applications
Applications use Clouds
Application Developers use Cloud Standards