While I wasn’t looking, a bunch of people have been making real progress in standards-based calendaring interop. I’ve been talking to a few of them, and it’s fascinating to see momentum building in that arena. There are clients getting mature (Thunderbird with Lightning, Apple’s iCal in Leopard, Chandler Desktop, Evolution, probably others I’m forgetting or don’t know about). There are servers getting there too (Chandler’s server, Apple’s CalendarServer, Bongo, a couple that I know about but don’t know if I can talk about publicly yet). As far as I can tell, the CalConnect consortium is working, making sure that people play the interop game, even though I’m sure it’s hard work. It would be nice if Google wasn’t so far out in left field, but you can’t have everything.

Nothing like being minority players to get competitors to cooperate on pushing a standard forward!