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Welcome to ConsortiumInfo.org
Tuesday, February 09 2010 @ 12:35 PM EST
 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.
Chapter 4 – 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.
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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.
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Quote of the Day“ Symbian is the product of a carrier-focused world where voice minutes mattered and data came only from walled gardens” -ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn, suggesting that Symbian's day in the sun has passed See all Quotes
Latest NewsStandards meet open source: NFC is a standard developed by a client of mine, the NFC Forum, for very short range wireless communications - such as touching your cell phone to the gate at a cinema or concert venue to get in, after buying a ticket on line, using the same phone, or another computer. Increasingly, I'm seeing that the adoption of standards that my consortium clients develop are being supported by open source projects, and often by individual members, or groups of companies, acting on their own rather then as a sponsored activity by the consortium itself. The story below is a good example of this marriage of two related types of collaborative activity.NFC stack goes open source
Eric Brown
LinuxDevices.com February 9, 2010 - Inside Contactless, a manufacturer of near field communications (NFC) chips, is releasing "Open NFC," an open source version of its NFC protocol stack for mobile platforms including Linux and Android. Meanwhile, Juniper projects that NFC will play a growing role in a mobile-ticketing market that will reach 15 billion tickets by 2014....Open NFC 3.4 is said to be available for Linux 2.6 and Windows CE 6.0. An Android version is expected to debut with the planned release of Open NFC 3.5 at the end of March.
Open NFC provides NFC middleware for mobile phones and other embedded devices, says Inside Contactless. The stack is said to include a full set of interfaces, NFC software libraries and APIs, and a reference design, says the company....NFC is designed to offer a more power-efficient and affordable alternative to Bluetooth for very short-range, low-bandwidth applications, while also providing a more robust, bandwidth-rich alternative to RFID and other "contactless" technologies.... ...Full Story With budget released, administration starts pushing cloud message
Emily Long
Next.gov.org February 9, 2010 - The Obama administration has asked Congress for tens of millions of dollars to fund one of its key technology initiatives, moving common computer applications and hardware out of agencies and onto networks operated by private service providers, the government's top technology executive said in an interview with Nextgov on Thursday.
In his fiscal 2011 budget request, President Obama asked for $35 million to fund cloud computing programs and other IT initiatives, and another $70 million for the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop standards....Kundra cautioned that part of the process is setting appropriate security parameters and ensuring data can be shared and moved across different cloud platforms....A cloud computing strategy document will be published in the next two to three months, along with security and interoperability standards. ...Full Story Macmillan Books Return to Amazon After Dispute
Brd Stone/Motoko Rich
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Other major book publishers, including Hachette and Harper Collins, have indicated they will also move to an agency model.... ...Full Story HTML vs. Flash: Can a Turf War Be Avoided?
Stephen Shankland
CNET News.com February 8, 2010 - A difference of opinion among developers has become a high-profile
debate over the future of the Web: should programmers continue using
Adobe Systems' Flash or embrace newer Web technology instead? The debate
has gone on for years, but last week's debut of Apple's iPad -- which
like the iPhone doesn't support Flash -- turned up the heat....Flash has indeed spread to near-ubiquity on computers, with better than
98 percent penetration, according to Adobe's statistics. Its roots lay
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an easy streaming video mechanism to a Web that had been plagued with
obstreperous and incompatible technology from Microsoft, Apple, and
Real. But a collection of new technologies -- including a rejuvenated
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) standard used to write Web pages --
are aiming to reproduce some of what Flash offers....After years of HTML standardization disarray, browser makers Apple,
Opera, Mozilla, and most recently Google now are hammering out new
directions for Web standards....At the same time, these allies marching
under the "Open Web" banner also are creating new standards such as
WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web, enabling better typography
through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and Web fonts, beefing up support
for others including SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and improving the
power of JavaScript for writing Web-based programs... ...Full Story Canonical picks open-source leader for COO
Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols
ComuterWorld Blogs February 8, 2010 - When Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, stepped down and former COO (chief operating officer) Jane Silber moved up, there was concern that the popular Linux company might suffer from a lack of corporate leadership. Worry no more. Open-source industry veteran and leader Matt Asay has joined Canonical as its new COO....I think Asay will help Canonical a great deal. He has the knowledge, expertise and energy that's needed to take Ubuntu from being the darling of Linux fans to also being a popular business operating system choice. ...Full Story Did Symbian go open source too late?
Dana Blankenhorn
ZDNet Blots February 5, 2010 - With as much excitement as Scandinavians can muster, Symbian has gone completely open source.
Is it too late?...Symbian dominated the mobile world for years....But the world has moved on. Symbian is no longer the leader. Apple is....Symbian is the product of a carrier-focused world where voice minutes mattered and data came only from walled gardens.... ...Full Story Microsoft-funded CodePlex Foundation gets first exec
John Fontana
Network World February 4, 2010 - The CodePlex Foundation, an organization funded and created by Microsoft, Wednesday named its first executive director, but still has not begun to form its permanent board as promised.
Industry veteran Paula Hunter will assume the role of executive director, the Foundation said. Hunter has held leadership roles at open source organizations such as Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and United Linux.... ...Full Story Budget freeze could lead agencies to focus on IT projects that reduce costs, report says
Emily Long
Next.gov.org February 4, 2010 - The Obama administration's proposed discretionary spending freeze for fiscal 2011 could end up increasing investments in information technology, according to a report released on Monday by a government research firm.
In an analysis of priorities laid out in the president's Jan. 27 State of the Union address, IDC Government Insights, an independent research and advisory firm, concluded that agencies can reduce spending with strategic investment in IT solutions. The report also found that the budget freeze provides a need for agencies to build more standardized information systems... ...Full Story The Kantara Initiative for Online Identity: A One-Year Progress Report
J. Trent Adams and Eve Maler
IETF Journal February 3, 2010 - Founded in April 2009, the Kantara Initiative was conceived as an open,
global organization with the mission of promoting interoperability and
technology harmonization across the myriad identity solutions available
and under development. With the proliferation of single-protocol
solutions being pursued, the founders of the Kantara Initiative set out
to promote the deployment of heterogeneous protocols, standards, and
solutions for vendors and end users within the entire network identity
ecosystem...
Rather than setting up another standards body, the Kantara Initiative
focuses on incubation of ideas and concepts. If specifications emerge
from the groups, they are then submitted to other standards-setting
organizations for adoption and operational maintenance. Each chartered
group that anticipates producing specifications selects the standards
body to which it expects to contribute its work when it is fleshed out.... ...Full Story Cybersecurity budget request is smaller, but adequate, says DHS official
Jill R. Aitoro
Next.gov.org February 3, 2010 - Despite President Obama's request for a slight decrease in cybersecurity spending for fiscal 2011, the budget is enough "to move the ball forward" and will emphasize preventing and responding to cyberattacks rather than tracking down where they originate, a Homeland Security Department official said Tuesday....The division provides analysis of cyber threats and vulnerability analysis and early warnings. It also assists public and private groups in responding to attacks. The division is responsible for carrying out many of the mandates of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, established by the Bush administration.... ...Full Story
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