Re: fixing real problems that people encounter?

catherine wrote:
> 
> Many community orgs are in a very unequal position when it comes to
> participation in endeavors such as these. Big enterprise or even smaller
> companies allocating human resources (not to mention other expenses) in
> some of these projects, committees, etc., can practically write it off as
> a charitable contribution or, at the very least, fit it in development,

Actually, at least in telecoms (my exerience here is about 20 years ago, 
but I'm sure it is still true), big companies get involved in standards 
work so that they have a head start on the competition when it comes to 
creating products from the standards, and certainly in that arena, also 
so that they can bias the standards to reflect the way their own 
products work, so as to minimise redevelopment, and maximise their 
competitors' costs.

Some companies also put people on them who are strong technically, but 
weak commercially, as a PR exercise, to try and imply that the company 
as a whole is strong technically, whilst leaving real customer 
interaction to their commercially strong people.  (I've not done such a 
check recently, but if you look at the web pages of many companies with 
prominent W3C presences, you were likely to find really bad technical 
and usability design, illegal syntax, etc.)

I have rather dropped out of trying to track the W3C politics,  but my 
general feeling is that it has moved from the original web concept of 
being for the information users (and incidental content providers), to 
being for the commercial content providers; from a communication medium 
to an advertising medium.



-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.

Received on Saturday, 12 February 2011 09:38:11 UTC