Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1511

Careful how you say this. Maybe there's a definition of "de facto standard" that includes both the methods-methodologies you're talking about and also the kinds of things I had in mind, but I maintain that that's not what I meant. Maybe I should have, but I didn't. I'm still not convinced that the term applies to what you're talking about.

I stil perceive a difference in kind between ways of producing software (which I think is what you're talking about) and such things as file formats, communication protocols, programming language definitions, etc. I would not apply the term "de facto standard" to the former. But this is probably a language quibble and not that useful to pursue.

Sure. And the way I hear it, if the standard is being written by committee (as many of the ones I know about are), it may take many many hours of discussion and arguing to get something everyone will accept. This is almost certainly a good thing.

Well .... Then we aren't we all using TECO? :-)

I don't know what you mean here -- they all evolve? Yeah. What I meant is that as far as I can tell, some standards arise as a result of a fairly formal and often semi-public process that gets input from many sources, whereas others .... Well, maybe the internal procedures MS uses to decide the details of the .doc format are more formal and organized than we think.

Now this is the kind of thing I mean. No central body decided this; it "just grew".

snip -- interesting points but I don't have time and energy to respond right now

It's a reasonably safe buttumption if the vast majority of people are using the latest version of Office. MS undoubtedly does its best to make this true. And maybe calling something a "de facto standard" implies a level of acceptance that some of us would not want to confer on one company's efforts to maintain market dominance. I think I'm running out of useful things to say here, though. "Whatever"?

-- B. L. Mbuttingill ObDisclaimer: I don't speak for my employers; they return the favor.