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Fast Wi-Fi's Slow Road To Standardization
CWmike contributes this excerpt from Computerworld: "For a technology that's all about being fast, 802.11n Wi-Fi sure took its sweet time to become a standard, writes Steven J. Vaughan Nichols. In fact, until September 2009, it wasn't, officially, even a standard. But that didn't stop vendors from implementing it for several years beforehand, causing confusion and upset when networking gear that used draft standards from different suppliers wouldn't always work at the fastest possible speed when connected. It wasn't supposed to be that way. But, for years, the Wi-Fi hardware big dogs fought over the 802.11n protocol like it was a chew toy. The result: it took five drama-packed years for the standard to come to fruition. The delay was never over the technology. In fact, the technical tricks that give 802.11n its steady connection speeds of 100Mbps to 140Mbps have been well-known for years."
I went through two small companies working on pre-standard N devices. Both went under as a little company you can't pre-run a standard to market. We were ready for production 7 years ago.
So yes, drama that personally affected me as I went through two collapsing companies.
So I guess you'll not be using any of that "not-yet-finalized" html5 stuff, or any beta software from Google ?
After all, no one should invent anything until it's been discussed in committee for a minimum of 10 years, until the technology it is attempting to standardize has already been superseded by something better !
Thank [deity-of-your-choice] they didnt invent the wheel using open standards. It probably would have had 6 sides, none of which are equal in length, a 100 page operating manual, a concession to Pantone that it should only be made in RGB color 255,147,97, and an alternative implementation involving Microsoft's .innerHTML
Anything that takes longer to describe than it does to make is probably better not describing. Just use the bloody thing and be done with it.
Terrible examples. I really don't think you appreciate the difference between open standards and proprietary "standards". That, or you understand it perfectly well but find it inconvenient for your argument, PR-style.
HTML5 is intended to be an open standard, so in this case you're making my point for me. There was a draft standard of HTML5 released January 2008. This too was produced openly. A vendor who produces something based on this draft standard is using the same specifications that are available to all other vendors. The same will be the case with the finalized standard.
That has not been the case with the proprietary draft-N implementations. Each vendor has their own version of draft-N. It's very similar to Microsoft's practice of embrace-and-extend. Interoperability with another vendor's implementation is not guaranteed. If you can't get Vendor X's equipment to operate with Vendor Y's equipment, or suffer reduced performance, neither vendor will file that as a bug and fix it. Instead, both will tell you "we recommend you use our products for all your networking needs". You think this is just like HTML5, that you're really comparing an apple to an apple here?
Most of the beta software that Google has released for download has been open source (Chromium, for example). Open source is no good if you want to implement a proprietary standard. It's great when you want the world to see precisely how something was done so they can interoperate with your software or port it to other platforms. Google obviously understands the value of this. That again serves to reinforce my point.
This is just another example of a phony debate tactic. If there's not a term for this, there should be. The procedure goes like this:
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein