Dilbert Deconstructs "Industry Standards"(businessinsider.com)

33 pointsby cwan17 anni fa6 comments

Dilbert Deconstructs "Industry Standards"

http://www.businessinsider.com/dilbert-deconstructs-industry-standards-2009-9

4 comments

I often times feel like this when I am told by upper management to try and push a change on a vendor that will mitigate a problem specific to our architecture. Most of the time the support person is gracious, saying they will take it to their product development team. But, deep down, I know that as soon as the team hears the request/suggestion it goes straight to the waste bin.

seldo17 anni fa

This effect is very noticeable in the HTML 5 process. <video> is an attack on Adobe; offline storage is Google's attempt to make Gears a browser built-in so GMail works better everywhere, etc.

But is this really so bad? With luck, you get a compromise that works reasonably well for everyone. If you just leave the standards body to get on with it by themselves, they produce theoretically elegant but totally impractical standards like XHTML 2.0 (or, even earlier, HTML 3.0).

three1417 anni fa

I think you can see an example closer to the disaster in the comic with the attempt to standardize a required video format for HTML 5:

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun...

sh1mmer17 anni fa

Having actually helped to write some standards (W3C, BSI, etc) I can say this is occasionally true, but mostly false, in my experience.

It's a cute cliche, but I think there are other issues behind the apparent grinding pace of standards, particularly web standards.

gamble17 anni fa

I've been told that the political machinations on the committees that decide hardware standards are far more cutthroat than software standards. Software patents aren't very lucrative, whereas owning a patent that's necessary to implement a hardware standard with millions of licensed devices (networking, media, etc) can be worth an awful lot of money for the patent holder.

philwelch17 anni fa

That makes sense. In software, markets have more say in standards than standards bodies. This can be good and bad (such as when IE-HTML/CSS becomes the market standard rather than W3C HTML/CSS).

keltex17 anni fa

Or Microsoft pushing for a single worldwide patent system:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10334285-92.html?part=rss&#...