Quanta and MIT team up on seamless device integration

You don't hear much about them since they almost exclusively build stuff for other companies, but Taiwanese manufacturer Quanta Computer's name has popped up for the second time in two days. Yesterday there was an unconfirmed report going around that they had won a contract from Apple to build a new
15.4-inch widescreen iBook, now there's also the (real,
legitimate) news that they're going to be working with MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on a five-year project to get PCs, cellphones, handhelds, and other mobile devices to all work together more effectively
(the fiasco that is Bluetooth should be evidence enough that something like this is long overdue).

On one level we can see why MIT wanted to team up with Quanta on this, as there's a good chance that the laptop you own was built by them, but is working with an ODM really the best way to get something like this going if your goal is some sort of universal standard for seamless device interaction? As much as we hate to admit it, these sorts of protocols usually (though not always, of course) only get somewhere when they're imposed from the top down by a big company like Microsoft or are mutually agreed upon by members of an industry consortium (WiFi is a good example of this working well; the competing HD-DVD and Blu-ray standards are what happen when there isn't a single entity powerful to impose a standard). Even though Quanta makes laptops for PC heavyweights like Dell, HP, and IBM, that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll want to implement Quanta's integration technology (to say nothing of the countless mobile device manufacturers that would have to get behind this).