The proliferation of computer industry standards groups, which makes rabbits look positively abstemious by comparison, was always likely to lead to some of the more marginal ones finding themselves over-staffed with underemployed people, but it comes as something of a surprise that the first to be forced to bite the bullet should be the Corporation for Open Systems in McLean, Virginia. Earlier this month, the Corporation laid off 41 people, nearly half its total workforce, citing lower than expected sales of its Open Systems Interconnection compliance testers, and redundancy because of collaborations with other standards groups. Business at the Corporation is running at $10m to $12m a year, and it had looked for sale of the testers to grow its business by 35% this year, but it has managed only 20%. According to Computer Systems News, the testers it offers are for 802.4 Token-passing nets and for Manufacturing Automation Protocol/Technical Office Protocol, and has seen little demand for the Token Bus testers. It is also collaborating with the European Standards Promotion and Applications Group, the OSI/Network Management Forum and the MAP/TOP Users Group, which are doing some of the things that the Corporation was established to do.
