Hell hath no fury like a self-appointed regulatory body scorned. A little while ago the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA)—an august institution dedicated to developing standards within the mobile device industry—sent me an angry letter because we were still displaying their logo, but had stopped paying our dues. Fair enough, I suppose. But a nerve was definitely touched.
Why? Because the letter reminded me that regulators, like the OMA, are much better at self-promotion than whatever it is they’re supposed to be supporting. In this case,“the leading industry forum for developing market driven, interoperable mobile service enablers.” (I should also note these life-enhancing words are copyright © OMA 2010.) When I was CEO of Volantis (back in the high-blood-pressure years) we participated in many open standards initiatives, and our reward was…our reward was…was…you know, I’ve got no idea what our reward was.
However, I learned to be wary of standards body culture. Did you know, for example, that most (I’m saying most, it’s probably all) large IT suppliers have standards body professionals who make their entire careers out of turning up at standardization events and venturing their opinions?
Sometime before Volantis, I worked on UNIX, which was sentenced to death by standardization in the mid-90s (Anyone remember the Open Software Foundation? UNIX International? X/Open? POSIX? IEEE 1003?) The last two are actually identical, by the way – why have one standard when you can have two names for exactly the same thing? And before that, I worked on OSI, a standards-based set of networking protocols which was meant to crush TCP/IP beneath its over-architected heel. Unfortunately, the OSI protocols, in turn, suffered a mass extinction event when the fiery comet that is the Internet burst through their calm, blue, fully-catered sky.
Which brings me to HTML5. HTML is a great technology but has been effectively petrified in amber by standards bodies since 1997. But HTML is proof that really good technology can sometimes break free. Against the current of rolling standardization, the most impressive HTML innovation has happened outside of the standards bodies.
What do I mean? Well, technologies like AJAX and then HTML5 emerged from innovative ways to combine HTML, CSS and Javascript – innovated not within standards bodies but by unfettered developers. It soon became clear that the existing technologies were, first, too constraining, and second, didn’t make sense. Why did it take HTML five years to realize someone might want to have a rectangle with rounded corners without asking programmers to hack them?
Or to have a gradient background? Or to be able to use more than a few “safe” typefaces in a Web page? Because it was trapped. So browser manufacturers started implementing new capabilities without waiting for the standards. And, well, innovation broke out.
There’s a downside, of course. Innovation generates variety, and variety generates fragmentation, difference, and a requirement to invest in solutions to manage and deal with change and diversity in the technology landscape. But change, diversity, competition – they’re all good things. Aren’t they? Standardization might make a bunch of things easier, and keep a large number of professional junketeers in air miles and free pastries, but it can also stifle change, and promote stagnation.
Innovation outside of standards bodies has also been behind the FT’s tremendous HTML5 Web app, the re-release of Pandora (sorry, it’s US-only), and is destined to be the foundation for Facebook’s ludicrously named “Project Spartan,” an HTML5 app store designed for the platform.
A thought to finish on: in February of this year, standards body nonpareil, the W3C, announced that HTML5 won’t “be ready” until 2014. But as the examples I’ve just given demonstrate, holding statements like this are destined to be mocked by the powerful forces of a free market economy.
Tags: HTML5, Intermittent Signal, Mark Watson
