In my earlier post (which was mostly about the recent Shirky entry in Valleywag – reLink) I suspect many of you didn’t catch my link to the C|Net article discussing IBM’s new EBO launch (EBO stands for “emerging business opportunity”). You might want to go and check that out. What’s doubly interesting to me now is something I caught over on the WorldCAD Access site yesterday. From the post titled “IBM Expands Presence in PLM” (Link):

IBM has formed a Product Development Integration Framework (PDIF), calling it “the most important announcement that IBM has ever made in the PLM space.”

But it’s not just all about IBM. They got eight PLM vendors to agree to write PDIF applications and connectors:

* PTC
* UGS
* Geometric Software Solutions
* MSC Software
* Agile Software
* Centric Software
* Engineous Software
* PROSTEP

Coincidental timing? I don’t think so. And as WorldCAD points out, Dassault is absent from that list. Given my post last week – “Dassault’s Common 3D Environment” (reLink) – is that really a surprise?

Looks to me like we have the beginnings of the next standards war – this time over PLM interoperability. Only now the two prime players, Microsoft and IBM, are also involved in consumer-level virtual worlds.

Slowly, slowly, things are coming together.