In reviewing my RSS feed this morning, I found this interesting blog entry by Alex Brown, titled Microsoft Fails the Standards Test. In it, Alex makes a number of statements, and reaches a number of conclusions, that are likely to startle those that followed the ODF-OOXML saga. The bottom line? Alex thinks that Microsoft has failed to fulfill crucial promises upon which the approval of OOXML was based. He concludes that unless Microsoft reverses course promptly, “the entire OOXML project is now surely heading for failure.”
This is the fifth chapter in a real-time eBook writing project I launched and explained in late November. Constructive comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome. All product names used below are registered trademarks of their vendors.
Chapter 5:Open Standards
One of the two articles of faith that Eric Kriss and Peter Quinn embraced in drafting their evolving Enterprise Technical Reference Model (ETRM) was this:products built to "open standards" are more desirable than those that aren't.Superficially, the concept made perfect sense – only buy products that you can mix and match.That way, you can take advantage of both price competition as well as a wide selection of alternative products from multiple vendors, each with its own value-adding features.And if things don't work out, well, you're not locked in, and can swap out the loser and shop for a winner.
But did that make as much sense with routers and software as it did with light bulbs and lamps?And in any event, if this was such a great idea, why hadn't their predecessors been demanding open standards-based products for years?Finally, what exactly was that word "open" supposed to mean?
To answer these questions properly requires a brief hop, skip and jump through the history of standards, from their origins up to the present.And that's what this chapter is about.
This is the fourth chapter in a real-time eBook writing project I launched and explained in late November. Constructive comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome. All Microsoft product names used below are registered trademarks of Microsoft.
Chapter4 –Eric Kriss, Peter Quinn and the ETRM
By the end of December 2005, I had been blogging on ODF developments in Massachusetts for about four months, providing interviews, legal analysis and news as it happened. In those early days, not many bloggers were covering the ODF story, and email began to come my way from people that I had never met before, from as far away as Australia, and as near as the State House in Boston.Some began with, "This seems really important – what can I do to help?"Others contained important information that someone wanted to share, and that I was happy to receive.
One such email arrived just before Christmas in 2005.In its entirety, it read:
Enjoy reading your consortiuminfo blog ... keep it up.
Happy New Year,
Eric Kriss
This was a pleasant and welcome surprise.Until the end of September, Eric Kriss had been the Massachusetts Secretary of Administration and Finance, and therefore Peter Quinn's boss.Together, they had conceived, architected and launched the ambitious IT upgrade roadmap that in due course incorporated ODF into the state's procurement guidelines.
This is the third chapter in a real-time eBook writing project I launched and explained in late November. Constructive comments, corrections and suggestions are welcome. All Microsoft product names used below are registered trademarks of Microsoft.
This chapter was revised at 8:30 AM on 12/11/07, most significantly by adding the "Lessons applied" section.
Chapter 3: What a Difference a Decade Can Make
In 1980, Microsoft was a small software vendor that had built its business primarily on downsizing mainframe programming languages to a point where they could be used to program the desktop computers that were then coming to market. The five year old company had total revenues of $7,520,720, and BASIC, its first product, was still its most successful. By comparison, Apple Computer had already reached sales of $100 million, and the same year launched the largest public offering since the Ford Motor Company had itself gone public some twenty-four years before. Microsoft was therefore far smaller than the company that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had formed a year after Bill Gates and Paul Allen sold their first product.
Moreover, in the years to come, PC-based word processing products like WordStar, and then WordPerfect, would become far more popular than Microsoft's own first word processing (originally called Multitool Word), providing low-cost alternatives to the proprietary minicomputer based software offerings of vendors like Wang Laboratories. IBM, too, provided a word processing program for the PC called DisplayWriter. That software was based on a similar program that IBM had developed for its mainframe systems customers. More importantly, another program was launched at just the right time to dramatically accelerate the sale of IBM PCs and their clones. That product was the legendary "killer app" of the IBM PC clone market: Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet software upon which Mitch Kapor built the fortunes of his Lotus Development Corporation.
This is the second chapter in a real-time eBook writing project I launched and explained last week.The following is one of a number of stage-setting chapters to follow.Comments, corrections and suggestions gratefully accepted.All Microsoft product names used below are registered trademarks of Microsoft.
Chapter 2 – Products, Innovation and Market Share
Microsoft is the envy of many vendors for the hugely dominant position it enjoys in two key product areas:PC desktop operating systems – the software that enables and controls the core functions of personal computers - and "office productivity software" – the software applications most often utilized by PC users, whether at work or at home, to create documents, slides and spreadsheets and meet other common needs.Microsoft's 90% plus market share in such fundamental products is almost unprecedented in the technical marketplace, and this monopoly position enables it to charge top dollar for such software.It also makes it easy for Microsoft to sell other products and services to the same customers.
Microsoft acquired this enviable position in each case through a combination of luck, single-minded determination, obsessive attention to detail, and a willingness to play the game fast and hard – sometimes hard enough to attract the attention of both Federal and state antitrust regulators.Early on, Bill Gates and his team acquired a reputation for bare-knuckle tactics that they sometimes seemed to wear with brash pride. Eventually, these tactics (as well as tales of Gate's internal management style) progressed from industry rumors to the stuff of best sellers, like Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire.
With the emergence of the Web, of course, the opportunity for widely sharing stories, both real (of which there were many) and apocryphal, exploded. Soon Web sites such as Say No to Monopolies: Boycott Microsoft enthusiastically collected and posted tales of alleged technological terror and dirty deeds. More staid collections were posted at sites such as the Wikipedia. The increasing tide of litigation involving Microsoft, launched not only by state and federal regulators but by private parties as well, generated embarrassing documents. Such original sources were not only difficult to deny, but almost impossible to repress in the age of the Web - and of peer to peer file sharing as well.
Moreover, while Bill Gates and his co-founders rarely displayed the creative and innovative flair of contemporaries like Apple's Steve Jobs, neither were they troubled by the type of "not invented here" bias that sometimes led other vendors to pursue unique roads that sometimes led to dead ends.
For some time I've been considering writing a book about what has become a standards war of truly epic proportions.I refer, of course, to the ongoing, ever expanding, still escalating conflict between ODF and OOXML, a battle that is playing out across five continents and in both the halls of government and the marketplace alike.And, needless to say, at countless blogs and news sites all the Web over as well.
Arrayed on one side or the other, either in the forefront of battle or behind the scenes, are most of the major IT vendors of our time.And at the center of the conflict is Microsoft, the most successful software vendor of all time, faced with the first significant challenge ever to ione of its core businesses and profit centers – its flagship Office productivity suite.
ABOUT THE STANDARDS BLOG
There are over 1,000,000 supported standards, with more being developed all the time. The Standards Blog examines how standards are developed, and their impact on business, society, and the future. This site is hosted by Gesmer Updegrove LLP, a technology law firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. GU is an internationally recognized leader in creating and representing the organizations that create and promote standards and open source software. The opinions expressed in The Standards Blog are those of Andy Updegrove alone, and not necessarily those of GU. Please see the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy for this site, which appear here.
Quote of the Day
“”
-Sample tag in the W3C's Emotion Markup Language, now under development
“EmotionML combines the rigor of computer programming with the squishiness of human emotion”
-Stephen Shankland, writing in CNET about EmotionML
W3C Launches HTML Speech Incubator Group W3C.org September 2, 2010 - W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the HTML Speech
Incubator Group, whose mission is to determine the feasibility
of integrating speech technology in HTML5 in a way that
leverages the capabilities of both speech and HTML (e.g., DOM)
to provide a high-quality, browser-independent
speech/multimodal experience while avoiding unnecessary
standards fragmentation or overlap. The following W3C Members
have sponsored the charter for this group: Voxeo, Microsoft,
Openstream, Google, AT&T, Mozilla. Read more about the
Incubator Activity, an initiative to foster development of
emerging Web-related technologies. Incubator Activity work is
not on the W3C standards track but in many cases serves as a
starting point for a future Working Group. ...Full Story
EmotionML: Will computers tap into your feelings? Stephen Shankland CNET.com September 1, 2010 - For all those who believe the computing industry is populated by people who are out of touch with the world of emotion, it's time to think again.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which standardizes many Web technologies, is working on formalizing emotional states in a way that computers can handle. The name of the specification, which in July reached second-draft status, is Emotion Markup Language. EmotionML combines the rigor of computer programming with the squishiness of human emotion....The idea is called affective computing in academic circles, and if it catches on, computer interactions could be very different. Avatar faces could show their human master's expression during computer chats. ...Computers could respond to your expressions as people do. Computer help technology like Microsoft's Clippy or a robot waiter could discern when to make themselves scarce....But there could be a dark side, too, opening new class of worries for those online.
Might a company target you with particular advertising if it knows you're jubilant or despairing?... ...Full Story
The Future of the Web Is a Matter of Semantics Science Daily September 1, 2010 - ...Nikolaos Konstantinou of Athens Information Technology (AIT) and colleagues at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), in Greece, state that after almost a decade of research, the fundamental concepts that would underpin a semantic web have matured, yet the average web user cannot yet take advantage of their full potential. They suggest that there are three main issues to be overcome before Web 3.0 emerges and they present a roadmap in their paper to explain how these must be addressed:... a lack of simplicity, integration with existing technologies and practices, and adoption by the web industry.
They suggest that ways to automatically add meta data to digital objects are now needed to make it possible to publish semantically rich content without manual intervention regardless of whether the "publisher" is a large corporation or an individual content creator. They also say that semantic technologies do not offer a substitute for current practices, rather a complement to them and that web engineers need not abandon experience but should build on it. Finally, the driving forces of the web industry should adopt semantic web technologies since their adoption entails a series of benefits both for the companies themselves as well as to the end users.... ...Full Story
You want WAPI with that? If you think rolling out a new cellphone is complicated in the West, try China, where cellphone vendors and carriers need to not only deal with the mainstream global standards, but with China's home-grown TD-SCDMA standard as well. Oh - and you better include WAPI security as well.
Motorola Brings Android to the Ming Phones in China MobileTechReview.com August 31, 2010 - Motorola today introduced three new devices in China including MT810 for China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network, XT806 for China Telecom's CDMA-2000 network and A1680 for China Unicom's WCDMA network. The devices combine the Android smartphone experience with updated MING features and designs. Here is more info on the new Ming models:... ...Full Story
ANSI Launches Pilot ENERGY STAR® Accreditation Program ANSI.org August 31, 2010 - The American National Standards Institute (ANSI), coordinator of the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system, today announced the launch of a new pilot accreditation program for certification bodies that seek recognition from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to certify products under the ENERGY STAR® Program.
ENERGY STAR is a joint initiative of the EPA and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that promotes energy-efficient products and practices. Because the ENERGY STAR products program has grown to encompass products in more than 60 categories and is relied upon by millions of Americans, EPA and DOE have put into place requirements for enhanced testing and verification....the EPA requires that third-party accreditation bodies operate in accordance with ISO/IEC 17011, Conformity assessment - General requirements for accreditation bodies accrediting conformity assessment bodies. Accreditation bodies must also be signatories to the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) Multilateral Recognition Arrangement (MLA) for Product Certification. ANSI is currently the only U.S. signatory to the IAF MLA for Product Certification.
The ANSI pilot program is designed to support the ENERGY STAR® Program through the independent, third-party accreditation of product certification bodies that evaluate and certify the activities of energy-efficient product manufacturers.... ...Full Story
Royalty-free H.264 may clear way for HTML5 standard Lex Friedman ComputerWorld August 31, 2010 - MPEG LA, the firm that controls licensing for a number of video and other standards, announced on Thursday that it will never charge any royalties for Internet video encoded using the H.264 standard that Apple favors, as long as that video is free to end-users....Just as with popular audio formats like MP3 and AAC, video formats aim to find the sweet spot between video quality and file size--they want to get as high as they can on the former, and as low as they can on the latter.
Much of the video on the Web these days is presented via Adobe's Flash technology...many popular Websites have made the move to support HTML5 video alongside or, in some cases, instead of Flash. HTML5 is the latest and greatest version of the Web's core markup language. The new HTML5 standard makes it possible for Websites to embed video that your computer can play without requiring a third-party plugin (like Flash)....the big browser developers couldn't agree on which video format the new tag in HTML5 should use: some sided with H.264, others with a format called Ogg Theora....The MPEG LA group, which owns the H.264 video codec, had declared that it wouldn't charge any royalty fees until 2016, but Mozilla and Opera were worried about what those future costs might be. Should H.264 video become a de facto Web standard in the meantime, the MPEG LA group would be in a position to charge a healthy fee for browser developers to keep using the format.... ...Full Story
Alliance Formed to Develop Electric Vehicles CRIEnglish.com August 30, 2010 - China set up a new alliance on Wednesday to unify standards and speed up the research and development of home-made electric vehicles. China set up a new alliance on Wednesday to unify standards and speed up the research and development of home-made electric vehicles, the Beijing Times reported...The non-profit alliance is made up of 16 state-owned enterprises from relevant sectors, including China's top three oil companies, two top power grid operators, and three major automakers - China FAW Group Corp., Dongfeng Auto Corp., and Chang'an Auto Corp. ...Full Story
With Information Sharing, Context Is As Important As Content Michael Daconta Government Computer News August 27, 2010 - ...Given that modern development platforms can automatically generate code
to process XML documents, a narrow perspective can affect the exchange
and any code that processes that exchange. The new approach being
spearheaded by forward-thinking elements of the Army and Air Force is
to create the semantics first, via a high-fidelity data model called
an ontology, and then generate the XML schemas from that model.
Although not based on the Web Ontology Language, the National Information
Exchange Model (NIEM) takes a similar approach, in which the XML schemas
are generated from a database-backed data model. The contextual nature
of this approach is that the ontology uses a more top-down, enterprise
perspective to guide the inclusion of bottom-up exchanges. The heightened
awareness and use of context were mirrored on the commercial front by
Google's purchase of Metaweb and the company's Freebase entity graph.... ...Full Story
IETF Internet Draft: The Network Trouble Ticket Data Model Dimitris Zisiadis, et al. IETF.org August 27, 2010 - IETF has published an updated level -04 specification for the
Experimental Track "Network Trouble Ticket Data Model," which provides
an XML representation for conveying incident information across
administrative domains between parties that have an operational
responsibility of remediation or a watch-and-warning over a defined
constituency. The data model encodes information about hosts, networks,
and the services running on these systems; attack methodology and
associated forensic evidence; impact of the activity; and limited
approaches for documenting workflow.
Details: "The Network Trouble Ticket Data Model (NTTDM) aims to simplify
TT exchange within the boundaries of a Grid and to enhance the functional
cooperation of every Network operation Centre (NOC) and the Grid
Operation Centre (GOC). Community adoption of the NTTDM enhances trouble
resolution within the grid framework and imparts network status
cognisance by modelling collaboration and information exchange among
the operators.... ...Full Story
Red Hat Submits Deltacloud APIs as Potential Industry Standard Joab Jackson InfoWorld August 27, 2010 - As the industry call for cloud interoperability grows more fervent,
open source enterprise software company Red Hat has submitted its cloud
platform, Deltacloud, to the DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force)
as a potential standard for cloud interoperability....Red Hat launched Deltacloud in September 2009 as a set of open source
APIs that could be used to move cloud-based workloads among different
IaaS (infrastructure as a service) providers, such as Amazon and
Rackspace. To encourage external contributions to Deltacloud, Red Hat
relinquished the Deltacloud code base to the Apache Incubator, a
repository for programs that may eventually be overseen by the Apache
Foundation....DMTF oversees existing standards such as CDM (the
Common Diagnostic Model), DASH (the Desktop and Mobile Architecture
For System Hardware), and OVF (the Open Virtualization Format)... ...Full Story
