Tell me you're not one of those guys.

I'm not one of those guys. To the extent that I am one of those guys, we're not nearly pretentious enough to think that everything we encounter or work on needs its own three-letter general acronym. I think everyone in some degree writes "ERP" or "MIS" software to run a business, but most places with an overabundance of acronyms are completely soul-crushing. I try to avoid those place and that kind of work.

The claim of support for interoperability or standards is common but a faithful implementation is pretty rare. It's a strategy publicized in leaked correspondence from Microsoft infamously termed therein "EEE: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" (look up the "Halloween Memos" for specifics).

EEE basically says that you start out by embracing and implementing a good standard for the task, you add some proprietary extensions, and before you know it you've extinguished the competitors.

Microsoft has combined that strategy with its monopoly position to the fullest.

You think Microsoft can't create a standards-compliant browser? They surely could if they wanted to, especially with open-source projects like Mozilla or WebKit floating around, whose code they could reference and incorporate (according to specific license stipulations, of course).

Microsoft keeps IE crippled because it's better business. If you force devs to pour special support into IE, which is the most widely used browser in the world, that's less time for anything else. The hope is that it will crowd out effort expended on ensuring compatibility with less dominant browsers like Mozilla or Chrome or whatever, thereby making it necessary that one use Internet Explorer to access the information he wants, thereby making it necessary that one obtain and use a copy of Microsoft Windows, which Microsoft sells for money. And so on.

It's important to remember that vendor lock-in is the holy grail for almost all software developers. They want you to enter your data into their supposedly "standards-compliant" programs so that when you go to export to the standard and encounter a "bug" you'll give up and keep the money in with them.

Lots of companies have no trepidation about this and don't even pretend. Both Apple and Microsoft utilize this often, and so does Google. They want you to make such a time, effort, and usage investment in their products that even if you wanted to use something else, the only way to do so would be to manually input endless gobs of data, something very few people have the patience or even the time to do.

So yeah, standards are usually a farce, probably particularly in the enterprise space.