[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: re: Good Times Ahead for "Sharecroppers"? (Was: [OT] Tim B
Hi Didier: Yes and yes. I played with the old Sinclairs. Definitely toys but only in context. Next we got the first IBM PCs. Toys but an open architecture and one or two really useful apps. Serious toys because we could sell them with value-add. Some just had to be cognizent of the tier and the application. Some were aware that these would supplant the micro-minis of the time and went into a watch and wait mode. Elsewhere, vendors tried to compete in building these (say Intergraph) and lost that market to better heeled vendors with rough play tactics. Because Intergraph played and obtained IP during that period, Intergraph now has some substantial IP revenue and in a time of flat markets, it's a very nice cushion. If one is being forced out of an ecology, one can still take the genes one owns. That's the patent game. It is as lucrative as one has resources to defend and license it. That brings us to the standards. If open lists of mindshare developers want to create technical specifications for potentially valuable content and implementations, that's great. Unless they are smart enough to create an entity which is legally entitled to determine the disposition of the products, they can expect this toy to be copied and sold by anyone with the resources, and to be dominated by the player with the most resources. It doesn't matter if it is marketing dollars as in the case of the PCs, or if it is personality egoboo as in the case of RSS/nEcho. The currency of the ecosystem (valued message types) will dominate the process until the ecosystem and the currency evolves, or the ecosystem dies. The energy budget delimits the lifecycle. Open Software Does Not Equal An Open System or an Open Market. It doesn't work that way. I grant what you are saying about the specs processes now being dominated. Yes, and that is exactly what wiser heads said would happen. That is why smart money in unexplored or ignored territories sets up relationships with entities that can defend the territory. That can be a transient entity (the independent development group with a tax number or even a copyright brand) protected by the laws governing a country, a specification or standards organization, a work-for-hire, what have you. Without an entity that can dispose of the rights, co-opting is inevitable if the property is of value. Stacking gold in the town square creates thieves. Spores control the researcher who must bring sugar to the petri dish. Developers who work on open lists without legal protections invite predators and flies. Be a WaryWiki. Who's working with toys today? That's easy. X3D. It's an interesting problem. The technology works great; it is the content that is hard to apply and frankly, given today's technology, that is a problem of limited imagination coupled to data costs. Once, by virtue of class libraries, VB could be applied to ever larger problems, it became a serious solution. That is precisely where X3D is today. See Universal Media. len From: Didier PH Martin [mailto:martind@n...] Len said: See XML and read the frikkin' names on the editor slots and the contributor's list. Now look at the list of every application Didier replies: Its obvious Len that most of the recent XML recommendations are controlled mostly by big guys. The names on the specs say it all. Its also becoming more and more clear everyday that XML won't be the technology that will change any equilibrium and most probably it will simply reinforce the actual one. Speaking of Nash equilibrium, there is actually one market where the actual PC dominant species are not dominant: the cell phone. Resolve the display problem and you may have the greatest treat the PC industry has known up to date. However, cell phones are today like toys for serious developers, like PC were for mainframe developers a couple of years ago. In 1979, for most observer, nothing could replace serious tools like mainframes, today, with a similar frame of mind, nothing can displace the PCs as serious tool. Cell phones are still toys. Yea, like my Apple II in 1979 with only 16K RAM, 40 characters wide displayed on my TV set and a toy language named Basic. I heard that one guy became incredibly rich with that very language :-) That guy was doing software for toys at the time.... Who's working on toys today?
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