The Standards Wars and the Sausage Factory

Esther Schindler writes "We all know how important tech standards are. But the making of them is sometimes a particularly ugly process. Years, millions of dollars, and endless arguments are spent arguing about standards. The reason for our fights aren't any different from those that drove Edison and Westinghouse: It's all about who benefits – and profits – from a standard. As just one example, Steven Vaughan-Nichols details the steps it took to approve a networking standard that everyone, everyone knew was needed: 'Take, for example, the long hard road for the now-universal IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. There was nothing new about the multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) and channel-bonding techniques when companies start moving from 802.11g to 802.11n in 2003. Yet it wasn't until 2009 that the standard became official.'"

Comments

The self-fulfilling prophecy

[robot5x]

The Beta Version prophets of doom swamp every story with predictions that everyone will leave slashdot and hyperbolic comments about how awful the new version is...

The remaining few who visit to read intelligent posting on critical analysis of tech stories get served up page after page of hyperbolic comment on how awful the new version is instead. They also leave.

The end

Re:I don't think Dice realizes

[Soulskill]

We've implemented a number of changes since the first October rollout in response to feedback. We'll be implementing more in response to today's feedback. I'm sorry we can't make all those changes instantaneously; our engineering team is small and flooded with work. But that's why the classic site is still available.

I can't promise that the end result will be to your exact preference; a hundred different people will have a hundred different opinions on how the site should look. But I can promise that we'll take all the feedback to heart.

Re:I don't think Dice realizes

[Soulskill]

Thanks for the reasonable response.

Some functionality hasn't made it to the beta yet, yes. That's a totally valid objection, and we're working to make it feature complete. My personal preference is to never lose functionality -- but at the same time, I'm well aware of the development conventions that say at some point, you need to ship. It's really tough deciding which features don't make the initial launch.