xml-dev - RE: Microsoft's Role in the XML Community (WAS RE: Important: The SAXC+

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

I may have sent this earlier.  

http://www.eh.net/bhc/Publications/usselman.html

It is a paper on how IBM came to dominate the computer business for an 
era.  In summary, fitness is also to be considered. 
That government approach to funding is not just that 
the most technically advanced survive, but that 
those whose fitness enables them to ensure sustainability 
prosper.  Look at the business:  complex feedback loop; 
lots of controls; and lots of rewards; high degree of latentcy, 
and running inside an environment that has zeitgeist issues, so 
even reasonably predictable.

MS has a role to play in XML.  For the most part, they 
have played it well in contrast to other efforts I've 
observed them in such as VRML 2.0 (a remarkable 
professional disaster for them.  Such political 
ineptness.  It was stupefying.)  

But(at the risk of waking up Dr. Newcomb), what is the role 
of markup in the ecology of systems?  Why do you  
think individuals fought for years to get 
it adopted?  As I've said before about groves, 
it isn't the power of it that interests me; 
it is the way of it; the behavior of systems 
and environments, in short, people and tools 
required to use it.  Open agreement.  We can't 
force others to be honest; we can shape them such  
that they are very predictable.

Len Bullard
Intergraph Public Safety
clbullar@ingr.com
http://fly.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/lensongs.ram

Ekam sat.h, Vipraah bahudhaa vadanti.
Daamyata. Datta. Dayadhvam.h


From: Eric Bohlman [mailto:ebohlman@netcom.com]

 In the early days of the Internet, though, the
government played another role, though not a regulatory one; it provided
funding that wasn't tied to non-technological strings, so that competing
proposals could compete on purely technical merits.


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