Re: SUO: The Law of Standards
John --
I think another good example that supports your thesis is the success of
TCP/IP, in the face of elaborate, well-funded standards efforts in the
networking area.
Doug McDavid
IBM Business Innovation Services
Member, IBM Academy of Technology
mcdavid@us.ibm.com
"Imagine all the people ... living life in peace."
"John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>@majordomo.ieee.org on 06/07/2002 08:27:17
AM
Please respond to "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>
Sent by: owner-standard-upper-ontology@majordomo.ieee.org
To: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
cc: SUO <standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org>
Subject: SUO: The Law of Standards
Jon,
None of the following models have been successful for standards
development, either of the de facto or the de jure form:
JA> What is a good practice model for standards development?
>
> Is it a think-tank brainstorming session,
> a collaborative problem-solving seminar,
> a paper-reviewing or editing process,
> a programming or writing workshop?
The most successful standards (e.g. FORTRAN, C, SQL, HTML, TCP/IP)
started with tiny R & D projects that turned out to fill a need,
which caused large numbers of people to "vote with their feet" --
i.e., by walking or gravitating to their use.
After a sufficient number of incompatible implementations arose,
the companies that were trying to make a profit realized that
agreeing to a standard was in their own best interests. The
published standards have been minor adjustments and extensions
to already successful implementations. In most cases, those
adjustments were made by picking and choosing the best of the
usually incompatible extensions made by various implementers.
As further evidence, I would like to cite "the law of standards,"
which I formulated in 1991 at the beginning of the SRKB project
(Shared Reusable Knowledge Bases). Following is the URL:
http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/email-archives/srkb.messages/24.html
And following is the original email. Please note the moral at the
end of the note. I believe it applies to the SUO project.
John Sowa
_________________________________________________________________________
Date: Fri, 22 Mar 91 01:47:31 EST
From: SOWA@ibm.com
To: SRKB@isi.edu
Subject: The law of standards
As a participant in various kinds of standards efforts within IBM and
some outside of IBM, I have formulated a law of standards based on
observations of various efforts:
Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official
standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of
some simpler system as a de facto standard for X.
Examples:
1. IBM and SHARE developed PL/I as a new universal programming language.
Result: COBOL became the standard for business programming, and
FORTRAN became the standard for science & engineering.
Note: COBOL and FORTRAN were both introduced in the late 1950s, but
the introduction of PL/I in the mid '60s coincided with a major
increase in the use of both COBOL and FORTRAN.
2. IFIP developed ALGOL-68 as the standard for academic computing.
Result: Pascal became the standard for academic computing.
3. DARPA developed Ada as the standard for systems programming.
Result: C (a language that violated nearly every one of the design
goals for Ada) became the standard for system programming.
4. IBM and Microsoft developed OS/2 as a standard operating system for
IBM-PC compatible machines.
Result: Microsoft Windows became the standard.
Although the cause and effect relationships are not entirely clear,
these examples are not coincidences. A major standards effort is not
started until a lot of people begin to feel the need for standards.
The proposal of a new standard and the effort to produce it heighten
awareness among the practitioners. But the long delay before the
new standard becomes available leads people who have urgent problems
to look for something they can start using sooner.
Moral: Standards efforts lead to standards, but not always the ones
that were intended. So one way or another, I hope that something
useful may come out of this workshop.
John
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
PS added later: A hypothesis that explains a fixed set of data may
be the result of chance. It does not attain the status of a law until
it has been confirmed by observations that were not included in the
original data. Since 1991, the most notorious illustration of the law
of standards was the failure of the seven-level standard for Open
Systems Interconnection (OSI), which was being developed by ISO with
major support from governments and businesses around the world. The
primary result was the triumph of TCP/IP as the de facto standard for
computer networks.