[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Arbortext bought
I think you are playing semantic games. Arbortext cut its teeth on markup and markup-based editing. The fact of standards is relevant but also apples and oranges. ODA was a 'standard' but not supported by Arbortext. "Standards-based" is by and large another pop culture phenomenon. There are good reasons to use standards, but buying 'standards' is a phase in our culture because for the most part, no one can tell us what those are other than 'lots of products can do this' and that makes them hugely irrelevant to the buy. We don't differ on the product lifecycle management company issue. At ten years, many here start at the end of the CALS consultancy bonanza. It produced most of the thinking that became product lifecycle management as it migrated away from military logistics (the ultimate in product lifecycle management) toward Commerce At Light Speed (the nadir of PLM but the beginnings of legitimizing markup as a message format for business transactions). CAD systems and CASE systems thinking were merging in the beginning but the graphicsAreNeverSGML gurus made it impossible for that thinking to survive in the original community. The markup technologists who start with HTML and are essentially fourth generation markup technologists didn't have to contend with that. Unlike some original stars such as Datalogics, Arbortext navigated these changes and stayed at the top of their game. People like Paul Grosso were quick to recognize the importance of the web and eager to get markup in full form in place. While the FOSI was kept alive, it was sidelined. While Hytime had the jewels, it was burgled and pilloried. Such are the fortunes of technical competition. Eventually, the good ideas from the overbuilt systems reemerge in different and usually simpler forms and the march to complexity starts anew. The shift to messaging does affect companies that have based their product lines on documentation by making them mostly irrelevant as specialties. Once markup became a mainstream technology because of messaging applications two things become clear: 1) With the exception of HTML, most of the markup document technologies exist in niches. For all its ugliness, WYSIWYG systems such as Word doc files still dominate there. Recasting into PLM is useful and a good niche, but not nearly as successful as relational systems for the same purpose. Taking a WYSIWYG object model and streaming out markup is far easier than taking a markup design and going in the opposite direction. So once understood, the WYSIWYGers markup-enable and that takes most of the steam out of the pure markup plays. 2. The focus on messaging reveals that the complexities of the work-intensive systems based on FOSI are YAGNI. They were tough to begin with and didn't get much easier. Systems that take messages and spit out HTML are easier to build, easier to maintain, and good-enough-if-worse. I don't see a lot of enterprises interested in buying pubs systems for their markup. They buy them for their ability to integrate. That is made much simpler by buying systems where pubs are simply part of the overall suite of products. That is why the mainstreaming of HTML has made the markup pubs companies obsolete. Most of what is needed can be gotten from the Office suites. The rest is a different job done by different people. XML won, so Arbortext has to merge or die. That is how business evolution works. When a technology mainstreams, it becomes the business of the larger and therefore more diverse companies. That is the price of success; selling the secret sauce recipes to the buyers with the deep pockets. len From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@p...] Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote: > It is a market that is following the technical > reality that XML is plumbing for the operating > system frameworks that expose browsers as a > dominant GUI metaphor. Markup applications > as standalone systems are increasingly sidelined > given the shift from markup for documents to > markup for messages. I don't believe that Arbortext sells markup applications. I think that they sell a standards-based authoring and publishing platform. That's what their website says and when I've spoken with their customers they seem to agree. A product lifecycle management company bought a complex technical documentation company. That makes sense to me. As you say: XML is plumbing (precisely: a technical means to a business end) and I think that both the purchaser and the purchasee understood that. I don't believe that this has anything whatsoever to do a "the shift from markup for documents to markup for messages". There is no such shift. Yes, XML's center of gravity has shifted but that is irrelevant. Did the "shift" towards the use of the World Wide Web (an application of the Internet) hurt the popularity of email (another application of the Internet?). Does the shift towards VOIP sideline BitTorrent? Apples and oranges.
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