Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

I chuckled a bit today when TechCrunch posted an item on Facebook, Google, and Plaxo joining the industry DataPortability Workgroup, an industry group working on sharing social networking data. I’m surprised the blogosphere is making so much of this.

As some of you know, in my “past life” I served on many a technical committee defining technical standards (for anyone who cares, NCITS T11.5 and the SNIA on the HBA API), and just “joining” a group doesn’t really mean anything practical, except perhaps some posturing that a company is involved and willing to interact in a public forum with other companies. In fact, in the majority of cases, it’s years (not months, years) after a group is formed that any kind of standard–even a straightforward API–usually is defined enough to be practically useful. In the age of the Internet, that’s a lifetime.

Standards groups are very important, but it’s important to note that, in the vast majority of cases: 1. standards are set by merit, not by posturing and hype; 2. standards groups are slow and methodical, and 3. open standards can sometimes (but not always) be trumped by “de-facto” standards from dominant companies in an industry (for example, Microsoft). I’d argue that in the case of Internet-based services (as opposed to hardware, semiconductor, or enterprise software) it’s easier to create a “de-facto” standard. Anytime you see companies talking about joining a standards group, I’d ask the following:

1. Are the companies actually involved in a leadership role in that group, i.e. chair, vice-chair, or other officer?

2. Is that company taking an active, supportive role in that group — for example, publicly taking the position as willing to work — and compromise — to develop a common standard, independent of the company’s current efforts?

3. Are the people involved in the group marketing, or engineering — and are the specific people involved the system architects and/or CTO of their respective companies? If the CTO or an equivalent isn’t involved, it’s unlikely the company is fully behind the effort.

4. Are the companies who are joining there to help the effort, stall, or to kill the effort? Standard groups are like the U.N. — often, a representative is in a standards group to delay or sabotage the effort.

Anyway, it’s one thing to announce that a standard group has published a standard, it’s another to say someone has “joined” a standard group.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.