Here’s the thing – standards are a means to an end. The end game in this case is interoperability.

How do I know that people miss this minor but important distinction? When they start talking about the openness of Apple’s FaceTime solution.

Anatoli Levine was kind enough to give an overview of the different standards used by FaceTime. So why doesn’t it work with other, similar clients? It doesn’t even connect to Apple’s own iChat service. Yet.

Furthermore, for some reason, Apple has promised to make an open standard out of it.

My take from it is that it’s an interoperability thing – or more precisely – lack of interoperability.

As I already wrote, standards are a progressive process – you specify, standardize, implement and then test. In this case, the process was already done. If Apple are indeed using SIP, then specification and standardization should be solved. The implementation probably doesn’t interoperate, which means that it doesn’t really adhere to the standard.

Mobile video telephony as a service has been around for a while. Over at VisionMobile I just recently wrote about the past, present and future of it. And I don’t think that FaceTime, in its current form, will really be the market changer – as a huge part of the missing usability issue with FaceTime is interoperability.

Apple will need to get there if they really want to win the market – especially as they don’t offer an end-to-end communication solution and they will need to connect with other devices to really make it work. And they better do it sooner than later.

Best place to do that? The IMTC. Especially if it is SIP.