- From: Liam R. E. Quin <liam@fromoldbooks.org>
- Date: Mon, 05 Sep 2022 22:46:14 -0400
- To: W3C Credentials CG <public-credentials@w3.org>
On Mon, 2022-09-05 at 15:55 -0400, Manu Sporny wrote: > Unfortunately, we have multiple examples (above) of there > being a focus on point solutions rather than generalized solutions. > It's difficult to determine if this is being done on purpose, or by > accident. There are a lot of smart people in these larger companies. They know exactly what they are doing. In theory the role of the staff contacts and W3C team is to fight off such behaviours, but in practice it's rarely possible, even where the staff contacts have the necessary political insights. Sometimes, too, you have to ask what would happen if the work was not done on the specification. A good example is the PICS work, which although it ended up pretty much unused, successfully headed off some rather severe legislation. In the other direction, the complexity of Web Services helped to sell a proprietary mainframe-based competitor into governments (and some big iron along with it that became part of government infrastructure). And i don't believe the people representing the mainframe vendor at W3C had the faintest idea that was why they were being given so many complex use cases. If you go back further, to the 1980s, the US government decided that only "open" operating systems with multiple vendors could be purchased. So Apple ported Unix to their hardware, even knowing pretty much no-one would use it, but would use MacOS instead. So sometimes a "failed standard" is really a success in an unexpected way, although most often a success for vendors, not users. liam -- Liam Quin - https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/ Cancer gofundme https://www.gofundme.com/f/5u9v7-every-little-helps Vintage pictures & texts https://www.fromoldbooks.org/
Received on Tuesday, 6 September 2022 02:47:54 UTC