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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."
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 Because defacto standards might become out of date standards.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.
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
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.
___ Shout Central - Crushes your nuts!
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.
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.
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
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!