[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Could XML be displaced? was Partyin'
On Wed, 27 Oct 2004 11:41:47 +0100, Michael Kay <michael.h.kay@n...> wrote: > All precedents suggest that once a technology is entrenched, it only gets > displaced if (a) there are important jobs that it can't do, or (b) there is > a trusted alternative that is 1000% better. With XML, there's not the > slightest evidence that either of these events is imminent. Maybe I'm warped by repeated exposure to the MBA crowd's favorite book on the subject -- Clayton Christensen's THE INNOVATOR'S DILEMMA -- but that doesn't sound right to me. Christensen talks about the distinction between "sustaining innovations" (making things incrementally better/faster/cheaper for existing customers) and "disruptive innovations" (that are often qualitatively worse that existing products, but dramatically cheaper/simpler enough to make them attractive to new customers). To use one of the technologies Christensen talks about, computer disk drive technology of the last few generations has done the job well, gets cheaper all the time, BUT keeps getting displaced in the next generation by smaller/cheaper technologies that don't initially work even as well. Why? Because the next generation enables new products that did not seem even feasible, much less "imminent" to the people who understood the previous generation. Think of a 10GB drive of 10 years ago vs the ones in an iPod. The only seriously profitable market for disk drives right now AFAIK is the one for the little things that fit in mobile devices, but the better/faster/cheaper versions of desktop PC disk drives are a low margin commodity. Could XML be displaced like this? Christensen's analysis suggests that it would be only if the replacement is so much cheaper (in various senses) than XML so as to enable new classes of applications for which XML isn't suited, while being almost good enough to do what XML does. So, I'm interested in determining the classes of applications for which XML is plausibly useful but not very well suited in practice. Hand authoring is one; that's supposed to be a strength of XML, but the RSS/Atom experience has very clearly shown that it is far easier to hack software to process tag soup than to motivate and educate even fairly geeky people to write valid XML. Is there a market opportunity here for a disruptor? Don't know ... I could certainly see a market for Office plugins that would let people leverage the power of its XML support but via RELAXNG rather than XSD and/or a human-readable XML mapping along the lines of RNC for situations where the WYSIWYG interface doesn't give the control you need. Wireless is another -- that industry wants standards, doesn't want to have to invent their own, likes a lot of what XML offers, but chokes on the bandwidth/processing requirements. Also, there's an incentive there to strip down the XML APIs to the bare bones that are really useful, and not support stuff that was put in DOM or whatever to keep Netscape happy :-) Some mutant descendent of XML specs is almost sure to evolve in the wireless industry, and could displace XML in the rest of the industry. High-speed web services is another: SOAP already implicitly subsets XML (no DTDs and all the cruft that goes with them). People are throwing specialized hardware at the XML parsing overhead in firewalls, etc. and it seems likely to me that this industry will develop efficient infoset interchange standards in order to create a "rising tide to float all their boats". Disruptive innovations there could also infiltrate the rest of the industry. I'm not sure that there are important jobs that XML can't do, but I think there are important jobs that XML could do better with a bit of profiling/refactoring/optimization ... and if this doesn't happen then I think it very likely that "disruptive innovations" will come along to do those jobs better than XML.
|
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|