[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: You call that a standard?
I can
understand the frustration of the early VEO days and the standards armies.
I sit
today in the other extreme; a company that has only recently admitted that
work
going on at the Department of Justice and OASIS might actually show up
in an
RFP, and now that it does, is caught napping. My frustration is every
bit as
deep as yours, but my bank account is likely not as deep.
:-)
The
problem with the 'let's just get smart guys together and figure out what
works'
is believing anyone believes them, but really, that they will cite that in
an RFP
so one can sell that. Some bits get implemented in say a
Microsoft
or Sun
application and no one has to worry about the RFP because the
work
is actually sold as part of the framework. The W3C is very good at
doing
that kind of standard. But we don't cite and sell those. We
build
on
them.
XML
as a requirement is a single checkbox in an RFP. Global
Justice XML
isn't. It is a large and expensive box to check. It is
also is a commoditizer
and
some will resist that while others will realize that a commodity market
isn't
a bad market if the commodities actually work and one can add value
without breaking the standard. For example, the database messages
or
web
service methods may be standard, but the presentations may be
an
area of competition, the analysis tools may be competitive.
Where VEO went off the rails was conflating standardization and
technical innovation. I am all for the 'chaos is the engine of
evolution' strategy when innovating. I am for standards when
procuring innovative products that have tested well and now
should
be standardized. I have no problem working with
proprietary XML vocabularies.
I
wrote the Enterprise Engineering papers and Beyond the
Book
Metaphor before Veo existed or Matt wrote those
papers
for school and Disney. That's vision work; it is not
standards work. Think how frustrated I got when
because
the
Air Force locked up BTBM and EE languished in a
CALS publication, I had to sit and watch some of my best
work die on the vine while others claimed "invention".
That's
the price of real pioneering, not the stuff the news guys
notice: obscurity. Well, that's the gig. Life in the
crow's nest.
We did
know that enterprises and agencies
would
integrate across the networks. We did not have the
detailed designs because we did not yet have the standards
for
addressing and the GE network honchos adamantly
opposed using the Internet when and if it was
commercialized.
So we
proposed what was there. HyTime went too far but at that time, it
was
what we had. HTTP did not go far enough and now
we
have SOAP. But understand this: those who do have
to
procure need a way to trust what they procure without
having
to go find those smart guys and ask them. That's
business. Standards are created for many reasons but
the
business reasons don't go away just because someone
says,
'this standard isn't ready or this product won't pass
the
conformance suite.' We have to meet in the middle
and
that is how we get standards that work and more
importantly
are
provably workable.
I
sympathize with the dismay, but I think it is the cost of doing
business.
Would
you like to be Intel producing something so complicated
that
no matter what they do, they will always trip on someone's
patents so now, lawsuits are a cost of doing business. No
free
lunch and all the smart guys in the world can't fix that.
len
I think the processes of creating recommendations / specifications / standards are getting worse. The W3C seems to be working, but OASIS has devolved from the place where interoperability was job 1 (remember the SGML catalog, the table model efforts) to a place where redundant and incompatible splinter vocabularies are encouraged because it helps the business model -- "democratically," of course -- but I'd prefer to have the less democratic process of the SGML Open days when the smartest people in the world just got together to fix things that really needed fixing. We don't need standards... what we need are things that work. And we need to organizations that claim to be helping that happen to actually do it.
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