Thanks for commenting.

I have some reflections on your points.

1. I don't see much evidence that ERP vendors have invested heavily in seamless audit. They were very slow in adopting drilldown effectively in the 90's, let alone seamless audit in the 00's. But I am happy to be corrected.

2. The whole point of XBRL is that it doesn't substantially change existing data models at all – or doesn't need to – XBRL is metadata. To tag an account does not require any change to an existing data model except an additional column in a table (I'm slightly oversimplifying of course). So retrofitting XBRL is hardly rocket science.

3. As I said, competitive differentiation is an issue for resisting open standards. SAP didn't get to where it is by being open. So I agree with your point about 'competitive threat'. I also agree that the impetus for truly 'open accounting' is likely to come from the bottom-up rather than the top down. But the ERP marketspace is notoriously difficult to shake-up even when XBRL presents an opportunity for a new generation of 're-designed from the ground-up' accounting software.

4. I'm not sure I understand what your point is about UNIX. It certainly impacted lots of hardware vendors (e.g. DEC) but had little impact on accounting software as many vendors thrived in the 80's and 90's without having UNIX versions. In the 1980's I sold some of the first UNIX accounting systems in the UK on some of the first 'name brand' UNIX boxes (does anyone remember the IBM RS600 or the AT&T 3B2?). The only reason customers bought these was nothing to do with open standards but because they could run a multi-user accounting system without having to buy a VAX or an IBM System 36/38. At that time PC networking was still a 'toy' that nobody would use for serious accounting and the only other cheap alternative was Concurrent CP/M with its revolutionary overlapping sessions.

5. In the ERP space, competitive opportunity generally only arises when there's a real/fake paradigm shift (e.g. DOS in the early 80's or client/server in the early 90's) or customers demand functionality that other packages don't offer. But I don't get the feeling that customers are demanding the 'seamless audit trail'. Which is a shame.

The ERP vendors have invested heavily in seamless audit, and will happily help clients implement – for a price. This investment required a strong understanding of their complete infrastructures of which data structures are only one part. Changing the data structure would be very expensive and time consuming, and a strong business case would be required.

Unfortunately the "killer" section of the business case has a section header of "Competitive Threat" and discusses the potential for lost business if their products become fully open and independent standards based.

The good news is that for some, open standards will eventually prevail. This will be at the "lower end" of the ERP market, where providers will gain a competitive advantage by being open, or non-proprietary.

The historical analogy is the computer operating system environment. twenty five years ago there are a number of operating systems, from DOS, to MVS, VM, Prime, Wang, DEC, Sun, DataGeneral, ICL, Honeywell. The list goes on. And into this mix came Unix. And Unix was small, and "open" and shunned by all of the very large systems providers. Today there remain a number of operating systems, but almost all will run an Unix shell to allow any Unix application or environment to run seamlessly.

But the move to Unix almost killed the computer majors, or perhaps they were almost killed by their lack of flexibility in responding to the market.

Unfortunately I do not yet see the Oracles, SAPs, etc, cringing in fear of open sources standards for either data or accounting / ERP systems. When that happens, we will see the business case change from "Competitive Threat" to "Competitive Opportunity". Then and only then will the investment be seriously considered.