"The bottom line is the challenging vendor always likes standards the best, and the entrenched vendor tends to fight standards to maintain its dominance," he said. Historically, Microsoft has made a living by jumping into a new market and proposing a standard that does not include its entrenched leader--in this case, AOL. Two years ago, Microsoft tried to establish a standard for data warehousing without Oracle's involvement. Oracle, a database giant, balked at the proposal originally, but it recently succumbed and announced support for the standard. Deanna Sanford, MSN's lead product manager, said Microsoft invited AOL to join the Internet messaging standards effort two years ago, but AOL refused. An AOL spokeswoman declined to state the reason the company does not support coming up with a standard--and whether it would in the future. The requirements for proposing protocol to connect the chat software is still winding its way through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).