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

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 Because defacto standards might become out of date standards.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.

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.

'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?