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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+
 On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Wendell Piez wrote: > 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? In fact, the development of television broadcast standards was a perfect example of a case where a small dose of (gasp!) government regulation greatly enhanced the ability of the private sector to create value. In the US, the FCC basically told the fledgling broadcast industry that it would approve *one* television broadcast standard and it was up to the industry to create it, rather than having different companies put out competing standards and let the marketplace pick the winner (the way it did with AM stereo). If they had done the latter, someone probably *would* have come up with a standard that was *technically* superior to Never The Same Color, but it might well have failed for non-nerdy reasons. The reason this strategy was so successful is that it eliminated the chicken-and-egg problems that the "marketplace" approach would have caused. In order to have any shot at winning under the latter approach, a standard would have had to get simultaneous buy-in from 1) TV set manufacturers 2) Transmission equipment manufacturers 3) Program content producers 4) Broadcasters 5) TV set consumers 6) Retailers 7) Advertisers *all* of whom would be stuck with warehouses full of very expensive boat anchors, and libraries of incompatible programming, if they picked anything other than the winning format (remember the electronics were a lot better back then). Now the situation with Internet standards is rather different as the chicken-and-egg problem is nowhere near as severe: any effort put into developing a non-winning standard is at least partially repurposable, since the "only" thing that would be wasted is human time, and knowledge gained from a failed project retains its value, unlike manufactured goods that nobody wants. In the early days of the Internet, though, the government played another role, though not a regulatory one; it provided funding that wasn't tied to non-technological strings, so that competing proposals could compete on purely technical merits. *************************************************************************** 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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