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."

Comments

Ahem ...

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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*

Sure but the benifits are worth it.

[will_die]

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.

Standards can be a PAIN.... BUT!!!!

[SerpentMage]

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 Because defacto standards might become out of date standards.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....

Re:Standards can be a PAIN.... BUT!!!!

[arakon]

Ah, but if you read the article, this is where the author says the problem is. Not so much that standards exist, but that companies are getting together to make "false" standards, to make they're product look better and secure IP and with it cash flow.

Your Cell phone example is a perfect example of this, I'm willing to bet cash that every one of those cell phone companies claim their format as a "standard". But isn't the definition of a standard, as something that is widely recognized as being true or correct? So who decides something is standard?

Did you vote on something to make it a standard?

Or do you think some corporate lawyers in a room somewhere decided "Hey if we make a committee of '3rd party represenatives', send them up to the lake and get them some nice things, we'll get them to declair our companies IP as a standard increasing our share-holder confidence! PROFIT!"

See thats where the problem lies, the "standards" aren't really standards and they aren't being established for the good of the people the are being made for the good of the corporations bank accounts.

Re:Standards can be a PAIN.... BUT!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The definition of standard will vary depending on your viewpoint.

For example, I would define something as a standard if two idependent implementations can interoperate reliably. A manufacturer would usually consider something a standard if it is a document that has been produced by an idependent or industry body. Marketing would consider something standard if they were told it was, or if they thought it would sell well. The user considers something standard if thats all they ever use; their de-facto standard.

So it depends. Some things that people would call standard only fall under one of these definitions. Some fall under all of them. Some even manage to fall under none of them and yet people still call them standard.

Its one of those nice poorly-defined fuzzy words that can mean anything you want it too, which is of course a very big problem for the technical crowd in placed like Slashdot where precise definition is everything.

important for concerted progress

[bongobongo]

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 .

Standards get ignored anyway if they do...

[AtariAmarok]

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....

Re:Standards get ignored anyway if they do...

[klmth]

This is all well and good when talking about GUI standards, which are in effect little but guidelines.

Now, when we talk about interoperability standards, things get a lot trickier. You want to implement a feature not within the standards? Go ahead, but other clients will not be able to use them before they are patched. If you keep your extensions to the standard secret, you will raise ill-will among your fellow developers.

This is, in effect, what the author is referring to. A standard that is constantly developed upon is not a technology which should be standardized. Innovation happens - standards follow. The author is entirely correct in stating that a standards body is bad place in which to develop technologies.

Standard automatically less bad than roll-your-own

[Ed Avis]

Standard protocols may suck, but at least they suck in well-known and well-understood ways.

design by committee vs. standardize afterwards

[nestler]

I think he has some very good points, the best one being that a standards committee is not the place to design a technology. When committees design things from scratch you get horrendously overcomplicated things like X.509 and IKE (IPsec's key agreement protocol).

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)

Innovate this!

[Foofoobar]

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 guy is being silly

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

Re:This guy is being silly

[nestler]

Even the language I use to post this reply is a standard.

Yes it is, but you are missing his point. A standards body did not come up with the language one day out of the blue. People were speaking the language for a long time before it was standardized officially.

The article is not against standards, but against the idea that a committee is going to come up with a standard technology all on its own.

But first ...

[JamesOfTheDesert]

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?

An example to the contrary

[xeeno]

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.

'De facto' versus 'de jure'

[Ed Avis]

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?

Re:Standards do not stifle innovation

[EinarH]

Obviously, standards only emerge when a practice has been agreed upon.

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.

Further innovation leads to a development of a new standard.

Again, not neccesarily. Broad and simple standards like can last quite a while. For example in technology (after all this is slashdot); TCP/IP.
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.

A bit of balance

[Jeppe Salvesen]

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.