[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Hi Didier:
Yes and yes.
I played with the old Sinclairs. Definitely toys but
only in context. Next we got the first IBM PCs. Toys but
an open architecture and one or two really useful apps.
Serious toys because we could sell them with value-add.
Some just had to be cognizent of the tier and the application.
Some were aware that these would supplant the micro-minis of
the time and went into a watch and wait mode. Elsewhere,
vendors tried to compete in building these (say Intergraph)
and lost that market to better heeled vendors with rough
play tactics. Because Intergraph played and obtained IP
during that period, Intergraph now has some substantial
IP revenue and in a time of flat markets, it's a very nice
cushion. If one is being forced out of an ecology, one
can still take the genes one owns. That's the patent game.
It is as lucrative as one has resources to defend and license it.
That brings us to the standards. If open lists of mindshare
developers want to create technical specifications for potentially
valuable content and implementations, that's great. Unless they
are smart enough to create an entity which is legally entitled
to determine the disposition of the products, they can expect
this toy to be copied and sold by anyone with the resources,
and to be dominated by the player with the most resources.
It doesn't matter if it is marketing dollars as in the case
of the PCs, or if it is personality egoboo as in the case of
RSS/nEcho. The currency of the ecosystem (valued message types)
will dominate the process until the ecosystem and the
currency evolves, or the ecosystem dies. The energy budget
delimits the lifecycle. Open Software Does Not Equal An
Open System or an Open Market. It doesn't work that way.
I grant what you are saying about the specs processes now
being dominated. Yes, and that is exactly what wiser heads
said would happen. That is why smart money in unexplored
or ignored territories sets up relationships with entities
that can defend the territory. That can be a transient
entity (the independent development group with a tax number
or even a copyright brand) protected by the laws governing
a country, a specification or standards organization, a
work-for-hire, what have you. Without an entity that can
dispose of the rights, co-opting is inevitable if the property
is of value.
Stacking gold in the town square creates thieves. Spores control
the researcher who must bring sugar to the petri dish. Developers
who work on open lists without legal protections invite predators
and flies. Be a WaryWiki.
Who's working with toys today? That's easy. X3D. It's an interesting
problem. The technology works great; it is the content that is hard
to apply and frankly, given today's technology, that is a problem
of limited imagination coupled to data costs. Once, by virtue of
class libraries, VB could be applied to ever larger problems, it
became a serious solution. That is precisely where X3D is today.
See Universal Media.
len
From: Didier PH Martin [mailto:martind@netfolder.com]
Len said:
See XML and read the frikkin' names on the editor
slots and the contributor's list. Now look at the list of every application
Didier replies:
Its obvious Len that most of the recent XML recommendations are controlled
mostly by big guys. The names on the specs say it all. Its also becoming
more and more clear everyday that XML won't be the technology that will
change any equilibrium and most probably it will simply reinforce the actual
one.
Speaking of Nash equilibrium, there is actually one market where the actual
PC dominant species are not dominant: the cell phone. Resolve the display
problem and you may have the greatest treat the PC industry has known up to
date. However, cell phones are today like toys for serious developers, like
PC were for mainframe developers a couple of years ago. In 1979, for most
observer, nothing could replace serious tools like mainframes, today, with a
similar frame of mind, nothing can displace the PCs as serious tool. Cell
phones are still toys. Yea, like my Apple II in 1979 with only 16K RAM, 40
characters wide displayed on my TV set and a toy language named Basic. I
heard that one guy became incredibly rich with that very language :-) That
guy was doing software for toys at the time.... Who's working on toys today?
|
