Slashdot Mirror
Bell's Axioms on Standards
CowboyRobot writes "The inimitable Gordon Bell
has a 5-page article at ACM Queue on the difficulties and necessities of standards adoption, in which he lays out 11 axioms on how to best establish and adopt standards. He quotes MIT's Dave Clark, 'Standards setting sits in a boring trough between two exciting peaks. The first is the peak of technical innovation, and the second is the billion-dollar investment or market.' It's often the rush for money that makes us move to fast to do the job right."
6. Consumer investments are never to be undone by a standard.
I think this is the most important one - simply because if it does not make business and market sense, a standard is useless. Being an academic in the industry, I very often come across this - people in the academia want to implement standards without realizing how it would affect the market, and the impacts that it would have on existing businesses. And then they wonder why the standards failed.
Why? Because unless it is beneficial to the businesses at large, and makes technical _and_ business sense, standards are not going to be implemented. Not only that, changing or implementing a standard is going to break a lot of existing stuff, and companies often need to see some kind of adoption before they jump in.
And often, if a few big businesses decided not to jump in, it is going to fail because they would control a large chunk of the market. This is not always true, but sometimes it affects how things work - classic example being that of IE. IE does not follow standards, yet it is popular. Webdesigners design to make things work in the real world (tm) browsers, and not in compliance to XHTML standards. Why? Because it makes practical sense.
Ofcourse, sad part is that business often do not respect standards, and those setting standards do not sufficiently respect business practices. Classic Catch 22.
I think it is a frightening thing, but very much worth noting, that since the Internet left academia in the early ninetees, not a single new protocol or application has a widely accepted standard. Every single new application that has come along since then has been a hodge-podge of incompatible solutions.
Case in point:
IM - ICQ came first with a proprietary protocol, similiar applications were made AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft all using incompatible, opaque protocols. Industry talk of standardising is a joke, and free software standards like Jabber have no market share to speak of.
Audio: Real, WMV, AAC, etc etc all fighting for acceptance. The only existing standard is MP3, but that is only because it was used by hobyist copiers and never got any corporate attention until it was entrenched.
Video: How many times have you seen this: "Please choose video format: Real - Quicktime - Windows Media". I wonder how much it costs web publishers extra to encode everything in three different codecs, and when the end result is still that you are tied to proprietary players in Windows (and maybe Mac).
Voip: At least here there is some effort, and we have a whole host of different standards, H323 and SIP etc etc. But mostly different companies services are incompatible, and most users use proprietary game chatting software, or Skype.
P2P: Lots of different vendors developing incompatible programs with as opaque and complicated protocols as possible.
Vector animations: Flash...
The only applications for which we have standardized protocols, email, the web, ftp, etc, are those that were around before the Internet became mainstream. I cannot think of a single credible counterexample. I think that is pretty safe to say that Internet standardization is not rare or difficult: it is dead!