Apple's FaceTime: The open standard that never happened

Former Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs famously promised in 2010 that the company would make its FaceTime video calling feature an open standard. "We're going to the standards bodies, starting tomorrow, and we're going to make FaceTime an open industry standard," he said at Apple's 2010 Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. But it never came to pass. Carl Howe, an analyst with the Yankee Group, said it's possible some work has been going on behind the scenes. He noted that a company can't create an industry standard unilaterally. All of the fundamental technology of FaceTime is based on agreed standards. What is missing is the set of specifications about how those blend together into a protocol called FaceTime. What happened to the FaceTime standard? Special report