Take the quartz watch for example. When it first appeared on the market, it had a red LED display that only worked if you pushed a button. Not to worry, it will be a long time before we see translation tools associated with the golden arches. But in the meantime, there will be significant benefits for the users of the tools. Lets first address re-usability.
Standards lead to reduced risk, lower prices and increasing numbers of users.
I recently saw this catchy phrase attributed to a member of the Trados management team and it is quite apropos. Stated simply, different tools work better for different tasks. In today's environment, there are already tools like Corel Catalyst, Locale, App Localize and others that are optimized for the string-oriented translation of a Windows User Interface. D j Vu, Transit, and others that are optimized for paragraph-oriented continuous text. The developers at Corel and Atril Software have already made it possible to share memories between their tools for software applications, but the acceptance of TMX will expand those opportunities ten-fold.