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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Microsoft's Role in the XML Community (WAS RE: Important: The SAXC+
 Hi Len, All you say about stimulus/response, makes sense to me. Just to add, >As for burning Megginson, any organization as large >as MS could care less. As to burning him and a lot >of his friends, they care just a bit more. Measure >the response. Now, pick any individual in organizations >of that size and you will see a different response at >a different scale. You can work with that too. Not to speak of Mr. Megginson personally (I know I started it :-), what interests me is that the emergence of a public networked culture for technology development over the last ten-fifteen years (newsgroups, mailing lists, web sites) has been changing, if not the terms of the s/r equation, then its coefficients, and so radically that it is becoming a new ball game. That is, MS or any big entity might not care about any individual -- but maybe they *should*. We seem now to be in a chaotic, hyper-connected realm where there is extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, and conditions are always initial: so the loss of credibility with an open developers' community, or even one influential participant in it, can be very costly, even to the point of altering balances of power. I think we are seeing signs that companies are learning this, if only slowly. Given the nature of channels of power and influence (channels of rhetoric like this list), what a company does to succeed in the next century will be very different from what companies did to succeed in the last. Not only the appearance, but the reality of respect for the interests of consumers and competitors, may be more of a factor. The same journalist who made the "MS invented XML" gaffe in the Washington Post wrote again (I think a week ago), correctly identifying that the core issue in the MS anti-trust litigation is, who gets to set (and profit from) standards for emerging technologies. He missed one critical detail, however, by assuming that standards must always be set unilaterally by a dominant company. I think history would show it to be more mixed than that -- for example, the technical standards for the broadcast industry, were they set by CBS? Also, given the present state of the world (the earth as an environment and the populations on it), I submit that we simply cannot *afford* technological lock-in, to be paying tithes to any single company, and funneling all development initiatives through its culture, so as to be able to address problems. I'm not trying to be alarmist -- but the stakes may be higher than who gets to be called the winner. I also believe in carrots as well as sticks. My hope is that a seriously "meta" message like this one, might help to focus efforts on common interests. Let's all be learning from the various stimuli as quickly as possible! Regards, Wendell ====================================================================== Wendell Piez mailto:wapiez@m... Mulberry Technologies, Inc. http://www.mulberrytech.com 17 West Jefferson Street Direct Phone: 301/315-9635 Suite 207 Phone: 301/315-9631 Rockville, MD 20850 Fax: 301/315-8285 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulberry Technologies: A Consultancy Specializing in SGML and XML ====================================================================== *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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