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Are Standards Groups Stifling Innovation?
cpfeifer writes "Jim Waldo expresses a a controversial viewpoint in his blog: "Common wisdom, especially in distributed computing, says that the right approach to all problems is to use a standard. This common wisdom has no basis in fact or history, and is curtailing innovation and rewarding bad behavior in our industry. " He also goes on to clarify his position and explain his reasoning."
We need standards so that stuff gets done, communicatio happens, etc. But I do understand the authors point. But I think that standards are a good thing if drafted well, and leave room for improvement.
Great Linux Site
says that the right approach to all problems is to use a standard. This common wisdom has no basis in fact or history
*COUGH* decimal system *COUGH* metric system *COUGH COUGH* posix *COUGH* TCP/IP *COUGH RAAAHHH RAHHH*
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
How many people want to rewire thier houses with a plug system that provides more features or capabilities, but with the added costs of all electronics you purchase at target need an adapter?
Or how about having to worry when you go into the gas station if the nozzle is compatable with your car?
Sure standards slow down innovation, but the costs that the standards provide can be worth it.
Yes standards can be a pain and they can stifle innovation. But there are trade offs. And that is chaos. As much as innovation is a noble goal it has to be traded off with standards.
For example take WiFi. Gee imagine we had ten different WiFi protocols. What would we get? The North American Cellular phone standards where everybody has their own freaken way of doing things.
Yes standards should solve a problem, but standards are required. Imagine everybody deciding by themselves which side of the road to drive on. Or deciding that some people want 40 volts another wants 90 volts, etc.
Why not use defacto standards? Because defacto standards might become out of date standards. This is not to say that they should not be investigated, but if there is a standard that works use it....
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
without standards, innovation takes place in less discrete steps. it is not clear when "the next level" has been reached. perhaps in some cases standards stifle, but they really are necessary in my opinion (and the opinions of others, of course) if concerted progress is to be possible .
I think, if the standards get in the way of innovation, the would-be innovators buck the standard.
Remember the standardized user interface that was one of the early Mac OS's strengths over the other OS's out there? One of the big players back then, I think it was Adobe, "broke" Apple's GUI standards where the designers deemed it to be necessary; neither their product nor the Mac OS suffered as a result.
Standards are good where they are needed, but when they hold things back....
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
What is better a standard forced by law, or a standard forced the one holding the biggest piece of the pie. There is not way around standards, there has to be one way to interconnect and communicate with everything, like that IBM commercial there is no universal adapter, and the only way to reach this adapter is through standards.
Useless sig.
Standard protocols may suck, but at least they suck in well-known and well-understood ways.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
He's not saying that standards are bad, as much as he's saying that it may be better to take existing useful technology and then standardize it (think SSH and SSL, protocols that were standardized after initial deployment).
In the cases designed by committees, they ended up with something so complicated that nobody has ever implemented it fully (X.509*). In the cases that were implemented and later standardized, deployments with full features are widespread.
(*At first glance, the statements about X.509 seem contradicted by the fact that X.509 is used in SSL. The fact is that SSL stacks use about 1% of the features described in RFC 2459 (X.509v3). This is what I'm talking about: ridiculously overcomplicated committee designs)
Oh this is such a pile of shit. Without standards, the person with the best marketing will become the standard... not the best and most useful system.
Sure standards do slow innovation... but so does the the FDA when they ask for proper testing and years of results before millions of people pop that blue pill. Proper testing and analysis of innovations in technology need to occur before we just plaster them across the network only to find out later how gimped it was to begin with.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Point two: A standards body is often a lousy place in which to invent a technology
No it's not. Standards are there to get the basics out of the way and move forward. For example, you can focus on inventing a time machine without having to figure out if the screws on your machine will fit the holes in your DMC's dashboard, or calculating the power it'll need in gigowatts, instead of number of power-foos that no-one else uses but the power-supply manufacturer you need that precious device from.
Good standards are good. Period. Bad or hard-to-use standards tend to be replaced by better ones. And standards that once were great (like the imperial system) can also be replaced by even better ones (like the metric system). But at any rate, no standards means no communication and no progress. That's a historical fact. Even the language I use to post this reply is a standard.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
We need standards. There are far too many existing computers and a market that sells too many computers, regardless of size, to allow for standards to lapse. We do also need technological advancement, but a practice that makes sense is to take an existing standard and make use of it while working newer technologies through revisions to where they are stable enough to make for a new standard. Repeat. This allows for something like RS232 to be king for a long time, but ultimately be replaced by something like Ethernet. Ultimately, something will replace that, no matter how much speed we manage to get over it. Serial didn't start at 115200, it started in the range where someone with good hearing could interpret what a modem was doing. At this oint, except for special applications, serial is dead. Most of our modems aren't even serial anymore, and we certainly don't use it for peripherals. USB replaced that.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
There are no standards for standards. Because of this, there's no recursion - when something new is required, it can break from standards, but it must be worthwhile enough to stand on it's own merits - and possibly create a new standard.
Blindly following standards doesn't stifle creativity. The people who are creative recognize standards for what they are, and either conform or don't. If they choose not to conform, they take a risk.
One standard doesn't fit all.
MP3 is not THE standard. It is one of many standards. It may be the most widely used right now but that's because of applications like Napster which propelled it into the limelight overnight. It's all about creativity and how you work with the standards. For instance I know of many amazing web sites which follow web standards to the letter. And what's surprising is that they have used CREATIVITY to develop and mimic sites that use "non-standard" eye candy without ever breaking the rules of standard'ism.
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"Good standards can provide interoperability and portability. Bad standards can stifle innovation. "supports XXX standard" is not a real user requirement, particulary if XXX was designed by a committee of "experts" who, throughout the entire process, never once ate their own dogfood. The best software is developed by trial, error and experimentation. De facto standards are usually a much better fit to user requirements than a priori ones."
The standard Hibernate deviates from is JDO (Java Data Objects) and the claim here is that it is successful partly because it has departed from the standard which is more complex and difficult to use.
When I posted my last entry, I realized that I might be stirring up a hornet's nest. Indeed, I could hear the buzzing just before I pressed the submit button, and almost decided against it. Such good sense has never been my hallmark in the past, however, nor did it overcome my hope that I wouldn't regret the posting. While I don't regret it, it has been instructive to listen to the replies. Some have been well-thought out, others not so much. But the replies did make me realize that I had posted in haste in one respect, since the main points I was trying to make have not seemed to have come through clearly.
So I'll try again. I'm hoping that the second time will be the charm. Either I will make my points more clearly, or I'll realize that they can't be made. So here goes...
Point one: Just because something is called a standard doesn't make it open; and something that isn't a standard is not, because of that, proprietary. The standard/non-standard and open/proprietary dimensions are orthogonal. Certainly, there are lots of technologies that are standards and are also open, but there is no causal connection between the two properties. Just look at the controversy in a number of standards groups right now as to the granting of intellectual property when contributing to a standard. If being a standard made something open, there would be no such controversy. In the same way, there are things that aren't standards that are quite open...look at most of the open or community software that hasn't been formally standardized. The source code is free for the taking; the reuse of that code is determined by more or less restrictive licenses. There are plenty that are very open, even though they are not standard.
The real point here is that whether something is open or proprietary depends on things like the licensing model, the intellectual property grants, and other sorts of legal notions around the technology. Whether or not something is a standard depends on acceptance by some standards group. Barring some connection between the two (which, by the way, a number of standards groups are trying to construct), there is no connection between the two. A simple point, but one that often gets lost.
Point two: A standards body is often a lousy place in which to invent a technology. This is the essence of what I was trying to get at by distinguishing between de facto and de jure standards. Technology, I would claim, is best invented or designed by one person or a small group of people, working together for a common goal that all of them understand and agree to. While there can be a standards group that meets this description, it is rarely the case that standards groups do. More generally, such groups are made up of a rather large group, each member of which is pushing for the good of his or her own company or interest group. Such a group can actually be a good thing if you are trying to determine which of a group of existing technologies will get the widest adoption, but they tend to be bad at creating a coherent, efficient, and elegant design from whole cloth.
This doesn't mean that such a group can't ever produce a good technology. There is no logical impossibility that is meant to be implied here. And while I would be surprised, I could be convinced that a good technology had actually been created by such a diverse group. But I don't personally know of any examples.
Notice, by the way, that there can be a small group of people with a common goal who work together towards an understood and agreed to end that calls itself a standards group. Many of the IETF's early working groups were just such organizations. But once a standard is seen as commercially important, it is much less likely that the standards group will be made up of such technologists. Again, this is a personal observation, not a logical truth.
Point three: The previo
Heh, or try that new M9x51-2-USB device. You know the one that looks for the power on pin x instead of pin y and bursts into flames when you connect it to your P38Y1N3-192-USB port?
1. "So the next time you are talking to a manager and he or she tells you that you have to use something "because it is a standard", push back. Ask why only standards can be used. Ask if the standard has actually been implemented, or if the standard will really solve the problem under discussion. For that matter, ask if the manager really knows what the standard is. If any of these questions can't be clearly answered, may the standard isn't the way you should approach your problem."
2. demand you use something different
3. be sure to tidy up your desk for the new graduate they will hire to implement the standard.
Standards allow us to communicate with each other with a common medium. Without HTML being standard you wouldn't be reading this.
And wouldn't people be more inclined to argue about which tech to use if there wern't standards? How would we feel if our boss came in and said we had to use the new internet protocol his 13 year old son came up with.
--I am jack's wasted life.
I don't mean to be snarky, but can somebody tell me what the word "standard" means in this discussion, plus tell me what is or isn't a standards body?
For example, is XML a standard? Java? CORBA?
Is the W3C a standards body? The JCP folks? ECMA?
Java is the blue pill
Choose the red pill
An excellent example is the mars probe that was (more or less) recently lost due to a problem with units. Or back in the day, when no one could decide on the compression standards for 14.4 modems.
The problem isn't with adopting a standard, the problem is getting mired in a zillion groups formed to decide exactly what that standard is. Since many companies and all governments are monolithic in nature, it takes forever for them to decide what the standards are, and invariably they go to the highest bidder.
A: Researchers.
Seriously, if you're trying to innovate, just go out and do it. Nobody's stopping you. Standards groups are around to prevent total havoc from reigning when you foist your innovation on the unsuspecting public. If your "innovation" requires having thousands of users to really get anywhere, then maybe you'd better publish a paper. Either that or sell it in a black box so your bugs won't perpetuate in later products. If you can't make it to market and you can't make it in the academic circles, then whatever stifling effect the standards group has had is for the public good. I like tinkering with my machines and occasionally watch them break in novel ways, but there are an enormous number of people whose livelihoods and safety depend on reliable operation of these systems, and the standards groups help protect them.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
What the article talks about is a difference between two kinds of standards. Those that codify existing practice (SMTP, IP, ANSI C, HTTP 0.9, most of the early Internet standards I think) and those which attempt to create a new standard from scratch. He doesn't like the second kind.
I think it's similar to the argument that says you shouldn't set a program's design in stone before it is implemented, because until you have a working implementation you can't know what the best design would be (nor indeed what the requirements will become). And I have a lot of sympathy with that.
But while a few years of anarchy followed by a period of standardization can work well in some cases, you can't seriously suggest that in areas where there are big upfront costs to get into the market it is better to let people waste effort thrashing around with a dozen different formats or protocols until one of them wins 'in the marketplace'. (And we all know that 'the marketplace' is often lousy at picking the best technical solution, worse even than standards committees.) Mobile phones are a great example. You need to have an agreed standard before you start manufacturing, not afterwards.
If new standard creation is politically motivated by companies who have a potential new product to promote, so what? That's surely preferable to having no standard at all, launching several new products with incompatible formats or protocols, and then years later trying to document and standardize whichever random one of them seems to be the winner. Case in point: where is the standards document and process for MS Word file format?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I'm not ruling out that it one day might change or somwhat evolve into something better or larger standard (TCPv2/IPv6) but because of it's importance the standard becomes de facto "the only way of possible soultion".
For example; the metric system an established and choosen standard im most of the civilised world has become almost impossible to change. And because of market acceptance no one *wants* to change from the standard into something new unless someone manage to create something far better then the existing standard.
The Economist had an article about the 25 years of succses of Ethernet in their latest so called newspaper.
They list 3 reasons why Ethernet succeeded:
-Simplicity.
-Open standard, as opposed to other competing standars.
-Decentralisation.
The later is probanly specific to Ethernet as a network standard, but the two other are probably pretty generic success factors for standars.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Can you imagine projects of this complexity being accomplished without standards? They have standard wood sizes, standard door sizes (carpentry is riddled with standard sizes for common things, but I'm not a carpenter, so I don't know the details), standard screw & bolt sizes. Then theres the plumbling, the electricty...
All of these details need to fit together in a predictable way and these specialized groups need to communicate in order to minimize conflicts. The lumber yard doesn't have time to cut new sizes of wood for each customer and the door manufacturer can't create special-make a door for each new house.
I don't think anyone can dispute that the software industry is in a similar position-- Teams of software engineers working together on projects, the OS needs to communicate with the software, blah blah blah. Of course we need standards! Some are more necessary than others, but how will we know in a year which web standards will be essential and which won't? Its good that we're drafting standards now so we have something to work with in the future. Maybe some standards will get thrown out, maybe some won't. This might stifle some innovation, but can you really argue its necessity?
Nay of the "examples" given of life without standards (yours included) would be quickly resolved. If CDs didn't work in all players, those CDs would be purchased by people. Most things would become a defacto standard, because that is the only way to make money. See things such as VHS for an example (there were 2 competing systems, and one won, so now that is the defacto standard for home video recorders).
The other thing no one is bringing up is how things make it into a standard. Many standards leave out advanced features for various reasons. You have to break the standards then to make use of these features. While a standard is incredibly useful, the things that are left out could be just as useful, and may be left out because people can't agree on them (whether it be because they are copyrighted, or a fight between groups over which of two implementations is better).
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Sure, there were lots of designs for gears early on. If we had standardized early, we might have ended up wasting time on substandard gears because the standard was immature. A bit of competition between possible standards is a good thing during the early adoption phase.
Stop the brainwash
The idea behind standards are that you can take at least one portion of your infrastructure as given and innovate on top of it.
:-D)
Examples:
Standard: HTTP and HTML
Innovation: Web Portals
While the progress of HTTP and HTML MAY have been quicker if they weren't tied to a "slow moving/stodgy" standards group this would have meant that things like Web Portals would have been hampered by trying to figure out what transport technology and client technology to embrace. (Heck you probably wouldn't have had a portal in the first place, just more BBS's.
Standard: US Electricity 110 V.
Innovation: Lava lamp. (Yeah, arguable.)
A bit absurd, but the idea here is that you can innovate on the actual lamp rather than worrying about the incoming current and plug shape, etc. A better example may be those replacement flourescent bulbs that you can get now.
So, yeah standards do in fact inhibit innovation in certain areas. The thing is, that innovation does have to be slowed down. You need to have some sort of foundation in which to build the REALLY innovative stuff on top of.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
You might be surprised to hear that there are other keyboard layouts around the world. Just slightly different from the QWERTY. I think here of the AZERTY (French/Belgium) and QWERTZ (Swiss/Germany). It is an absolute pain in the butt. I live in a country where all those keyboards are used, and I need half an hour adaptations every time I use another keyboard.
I ordered a US keyboard to at least have no problems on my home computer. My iBook however has the Swiss layout, and at work it's the French layout. Only problem I have with the US keyboard is that accents or umlauts are virtually impossible to do. I always wondered why we just didn't take the US layout, changed one of the "Alt" keys to the "Alt-Gr" keys (that we already have) and then just add the accentuated characters when that modifier key is hold down.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Basis State I state committee pos group mod one obj, temp found priepri mod object state temp oriented prie nunc obj language standard, temp declare nunc this state temp mod scientific obj standard fut sole.
... ... ... ...
Int Please req temp state aware be nunc clause state this temp equiv nunc mod intellectual obj property, and state state temp use nunc act sole mod state standard reflex act mod without state mod proper obj sole state temp payment nunc act of royalties act temp state prosecuted act fut by mad-dog lawyers for Microsoft such as the one who state temp state prosecute act prie hyp them group obj. English
2.
3. Profit!
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Why is this such a big question lately? Standards keep everyone on the same page so to speak. This is why they exist. I would think that as an open source community, we would embrace standards, rather than complain about how much they're hurting the industry.
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Of course that means your "standard" is now the intersection of what all those different browsers can display correctly. Which means there is no final authority and any new thing or new combination of things can blow up in your face. Not exactly an ideal situation...
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Well, not necessarily. Sometimes, one player in a market can be powerfull enough to create their own "standard" and then makes it everyones elses standard. Example IBM PC or MS IExplorer for rendering webpages.
.NET
Not to completely disagree, I do understand your point, but...
IBM PC is not standard because of IBM's power but rather because they opened up the architecture for other companies to clone and produce software for. This pushed the architecture into widespread use and therefore became a standard. Had Apple opened their architecture, perhaps Apples would be sitting on the majority of the desktops today.
I wouldn't call MS IE a standard just because most people are too lazy to download and install an alternative.
A better example of a market player creating and pushing their own standard would be
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
Are those at RS-232 voltage levels, TTL voltage levels, 3.3V, or are they NRZI?
Please replace "are too lazy" with "have no reason".
It's not because there should be the one true standard of everything, but that there should be a purpose behind the standard dictating the goals. Some may be more efficient, some may have been easier to implement, some may have been selected for interoperability. These goals often intersect, but not always.
You might as well ask your grocery store to supply just one do-it-all fruit.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
TCP was designed to give basic delivery guarantees at the protocol level, which is important for a robust, general solution. However, it is never the most efficient way to guarantee delivery. Maximizing efficiency requires application-specific knowledge.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
is a new one, at least as far as hinging product development.
The Internet was not built based on standards. In "Where Wizards Never Sleep", the story of the founding of the Internet, not one standard was used to design and build ARPA-net. Standards eventually emerged, but they were after-the-fact.
Read "Fire in the Valley", the story of the birth of the personal computer industry. This was one of the most innovative periods in our history. And not ONE industry standard was used. Rather, Apple, Osborne, etc. created their products, from which eventually standards emerged. Again, after-the-fact.
Go back further in time. IBM was not the industry leader from the 1930's til the 1980's because of industry standards, but rather IBM's own, internal, proprietary standards.
Standards are a nice way to not have to innovate and think. Just use a standard! But is what is developed by a committee always the best thing from a time or technology standpoint? Isn't it a sort of socialist or communist type approach? A Borgian way of doing things?
Let us go to the stars, dream new dreams, and renew the embers of hope that have long since grown cold.
The great TCP/IP vs. OSI debate that raged in the 1980s is a great example of what this guy is talking about. On the one hand, you had TCP/IP, a relatively simple protocol that had evolved informally over a period of years (de facto standard); and OSI, a much more complex, hard-to-implement standard that was developed by an ISO committee (de jure standard). For several years, many industry observers figured that OSI was going to replace TCP/IP, if only because of the high-powered corporations that were getting behind it. But what emerged from the ISO OSI process was a bloated mess of a standard, virtually unimplementable because it tried to do everything to please everybody. Fortunately, TCP/IP was so entrenched by the time the OSI standard was released, that no one seriously considered replacing the one with the other.
...
So what this demonstrates, since it appears that a lot of posters didn't actually read the article: de facto standards are usually good, because at least we know they describe technologies that work. De jure standards are usually bad, because they tend to be about political compromise rather than the quest for good technology.
Remember the old Dilbert cartoon, where the sales rep gushes, "this device conforms to all international communications protocols" and Dilbert replies, "so it does nothing useful and it's not your fault" ?
Yeah, but his point was ridiculous anyhow.
So, apparently he can't think of MPEG-2, or MPEG-4. He can't think of HTML-4.0/XHTML, CSS, or JPEG2000. Those are just the ones I'm reasonable sure were created by standard groups. If I wanted to go out on a limb, I could name many more which might be considered borderline.
Well, either that, or he is just being a tool for Sun Micro.
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