Once More unto the Breach

Scunt, the SS, and Language Politics

2008-11-04T11:54:44-08:00

Today is election day in America. As we go to the polls we have been drowned in rhetoric from both sides for this past two years. (As a Canadian, I still don't see why it can't be reasonably put to bed in 45 days, but there you have it.) I came across this brilliant Stephen Fry essay on the sheer joy of language and its diversity and evolution in my feeds this morning. The close was perfectly political enough to warrant blogging on Election Day, despite being off topic for this blog's norm. Much has been made about the slow erosion of rights and freedoms in this country under Bush Republicans. Fry tackles it from a linguistic and British perspective:

"One final thought I should leave you with which only occurred to me the other day. Sometimes, by accident, language fails to provide and when it does the results can be hugely detrimental to the human race. Orwell famously suggested that language preceded thought, such that if the word ‘freedom’, for example, is removed from the dictionary, then the very idea of freedom will disappear with it and be lost to humanity. A smart tyranny, he said, would remove words like justice, fairness, liberty and right from usage. But my thought occurred to me when I saw a graffito which took up a whole gable end wall in London the other day. It proclaimed, in great big strokes of white paint: “One nation under CCTV”. A good angry point – the American dictum ‘one nation under god’ sardonically replaced with a comment about Britain’s unenviable position as the Closed Circuit Television capital of the world. But … the satirical shout all but fails for one simple reason: CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch. If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials. For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” … etc etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS. ‘Britain’s SS is bigger than that of any other country.’ ‘The SS has taken over the UK’. Neither of these assertions would sound nearly as good if substituted with those lame letters ‘CCTV’, would they? Well, whether Scunt or SS surely there really should be a memorable and punchy new designation for CCTV – at the moment it is simply too greasy to wrestle. I wonder what other enemies lurk in our society that need names to bring them out into the light?"

The entire essay is full of such gems as it dances about from thought to thought. A little dense in it's beginning due to typographical convention, it's worth the effort. Please get out and vote!

Sun Quietly Continues to Support Drizzle

2008-10-22T10:46:00-07:00

It seems Sun Microsystems is continuing to support Drizzle. Drizzle is the MySQL fork that was announced at OSCON this past Summer. That said, Sun has been continuing to move developers to work on it internally (Jay Pipes, Monty Taylor). This is all good news. Based on the strength of the MySQL brand and history, drizzle stands to evolve into the next interesting database and Sun has a front row seat to best capture the upside.

Drizzle can be found on LaunchPad and has an active discussion community.

[Update 11:20, 22 Oct 2008: Brian Aker just posted his assumptions on possible directions for Drizzle.]

Mindtouch, Dekiwiki, and the New New Application Development in Enterprise IT

2008-10-08T14:18:48-07:00

"A PHP interface to a web services layer that allows users to federate and orchestrate functionality from other services, applications, and data stores." That's how Damien Howley, Mindtouch evangelist, described the current DekiWiki release. I was spending a couple days on the show floor at ZendConf helping Bitrock who had a pedestal in the Microsoft booth. Mindtouch had the pedestal next to us in the booth, and during one of the slow periods on the floor Damien gave me a demo of their latest technology.

I wasn't going for it. It's an open source wiki, developed by MindTouch who then provides enterprise support. I'd seen the demo a few years ago, and it was essentially some nice touches on a wiki for the enterprise user like a good WYSIWYG editor. Then Damien gave me the new demo. Mindtouch has added Dekiscript as a programming language within Dekiwiki. Think Javascript added to HTML pages and dynamic content development only applied to wiki pages. Now I'm NOT a wiki sort of guy but I couldn't help to be amazed by what I saw.

I wanted to explore the idea of what this might mean for enterprise applications development a little more. I signed up for a free account on their Deki On Demand hosted service. It took me a few minutes to get going with the user guide, and I thought I'd try something simple like pulling together a dynamic "bio" page. I grabbed content from my existing bio, and then using the WYSIWYG extensions environment, I quickly added the embedded DekiScript extensions for photos from Flickr, the last few blog posts from my feed, and a Twitter widget.

So the following fragment from the page:

Recent Photos: 
{{ flickr.Badge{tags: "Stephen Walli"} }} 
Recent Blog Posts:  
 {{ feed.List{feed: "http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnceMoreUntoTheBreach", max: "6"} }}
Recent Tweets:
{{ twitter.current{name: "stephenrwalli"} }}

Produces the following:

There's a complete security model embedded in the wiki as one would expect. There's support for writing your own templates, and site wide CSS, etc. There's support for writing your own extensions (and sharing them in the developer community). There are also large scale adaptors (e.g. SugarCRM, Microsoft SQLserver). So this is where it gets interesting. How fast could an enterprise IT developer with a little Dekiscript knowledge and the toolkit of extensions and adaptors start to build interesting applications. I don't mean a more interesting content management system. I'm thinking of complex content-centric multi-departmental work-flow environments like patient or legal case management systems. Is it still enterprise IT development if they install DekiWiki and develop dashboards with some simple scripting and drag-and-drop goodness? How soon before enterprise business people step around the IT department to do their own "development"?

Mac Django MySQLdb Problems and Bitnami Love

2008-10-06T20:05:59-07:00

I have an idea for a web property and wanted to explore Django as a way to create a prototype. I grabbed the two basic Django books and they each take you through the "how to install Django" bit. They start the discussion about setting up MySQL (assuming of course that you remember how that works), and then they each get to an innocent line that effectively says: You'll need the Python MySQL package (MySQLdb).

Now the fun begins. There's sometimes a wee bit of a problem building it on a Mac due to a confusion between 32-bit and 64-bit and PPC and Intel and which MySQL and which Python you might be using or have installed. I learned this much by poking about for awhile on Google. It took me a bit to realize I hadn't updated my developer Xtools world when I upgraded to Mac OS Leopard so that I was at least seeing the errors that others have reported. [The best summary is here if you want to do this the hard way.] A friend cautioned me around messing with the stock MySQL and Python worlds on the Mac, as it's a good way to make the shipped tools unusable if you don't get the builds right. I'm now a couple or three hours into the problem.

Then I have a brilliant idea. I'm an adviser to Bitrock, and on Bitnami they support a large collection of open source technology packages for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX (and Solaris). The packages are single-click installers that deliver the open source technology and all of its dependencies. The technology is installed in separate trees such that they do not interfere with the stock installed Mac packages. (There are easy ways to combine the packaged technologies if you don't want multiple instantiations of MySQL, Apache, etc.)

Sure enough, there's a Django stack for Mac OSX. A few minutes of download, a few minutes of install (and the autoconfiguration prompts for MySQL user setup before the install), and it's time for the big test. But wait: there's even an executable file in the install root called use_djangostack that seems to set my environment correctly. NOW it's time for the big test:

/Users/xxx> /Applications/djangostack-1.0-6/use_djangostack 
bash-3.2$ which python
/Applications/djangostack-1.0-6/python/bin/python
bash-3.2$ python
Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Sep 11 2008, 12:40:30) 
[GCC 4.0.0 20041026 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 4061)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import MySQLdb
>>> 
bash-3.2$ python /Applications/djangostack-1.0-6/apps/django/bin/django-admin.py startproject testproject 
bash-3.2$ cd testproject
bash-3.2$ ls
__init__.py     manage.py       settings.py     urls.py
bash-3.2$

That was a lot less painful than any of the alternatives. Now I can get back to exploring Django. If you want to explore open source software technology in a sand box or easily set up an application like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, or MediaWiki, I would encourage you to take a look at Bitnami. There's lots of goodness hiding there.

Caution: There was one other small configuration issue I needed to make in the next steps of configuring and synchronizing MySQL not covered in the books or [yet] in the README.txt file, and that was to ensure your Django project settings.py file contains:

DATABASE_HOST=[Django stack install root]/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock

InitMarketing TV Launch with Bruce Perens Video

2008-10-06T11:09:35-07:00

The first videos are up on InitMarketing.tv. Sandro interviews Bruce Perens in the kick-off video with fun commentary on open source software and the long-tail. There are also interviews with Oliver Nachtrab from Open-Xchange and Florian Effenberger from OpenOffice.org. There's an RSS feed for the site, and Sandro has interviews in the pipeline with Andrew Rodaway (Director of Marketing, Canonical), Fabrizio Capobianco (CEO, Funambol), Shane Martin Coughlan (FTF Coordinator, Free Software Foundation Europe), Stormy Peters (Executive Director, Gnome Foundation), Boris Kraft (CTO, Magnolia), and more. Enjoy!

Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy

2008-10-01T13:01:02-07:00

Initmarketing partners Sandro Groganz and Roberto Galoppini taught a day long workshop entitled "Building an Effective Commercial Open Source Strategy" in Berlin at the Open Source in Mobile conference. I was unfortunately unable to attend (and I love Berlin), but I contributed to the materials. It is essentially our combined experience and expertise wrapped up into a one day how-to seminar.

Roberto has posted a great summary of his presentation on his blog.

Nokia and the Symbian Foundation Opportunity - Part II

2008-08-27T11:25:53-07:00

The previous post looked at the Nokia acquisition of Symbian from the competitive perspective. Let's now look at the opportunities and challenges for Nokia and the new Symbian Foundation. Remember that assuming successful regulatory approval, there will be no Symbian Ltd. anymore. Nokia will need to manage the challenges that come with any acquisition. When you buy a company, you essentially acquire the assets (in this case the software), the intellectual capital of the employees, and the customers.

This acquisition is particularly interesting as key Symbian Ltd. shareholders and customers have banded together to deliver the primary software assets into a not-for-profit organization. There's a great white paper outlining the initial strategy on the currently minimalist Symbian Foundation site.

Essentially:

Nokia will acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Ltd. that it doesn't already own.
Symbian Ltd. employees become Nokia employees.
Fujitsu, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, and Sony Ericsson (all Symbian Foundation board members with the exception of Fujitsu) will contribute SymbianOS, S60, UIQ, MOAP and related software and documentation assets to the newly formed foundation.
The initial board directors will be AT&T, LG, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Samsung Electronics, Sony Ericsson, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone.
The foundation launches (expected in early 2009) and all the assets will be available to members under a royalty-free license.
A new platform will be developed from SymbianOS and S60 with selected components of UIQ and MOAP. The first release of the unified Symbian Foundation platform is expected to be available during 2009. The platform will offer the means to build a complete mobile device while providing the tools to differentiate devices through tailoring of the user experience, applications and services.
The new platform is to be backwards compatible with SymbianOS v9 and S60 3rd Edition.
Platform assets will be made available as open source gradually over the next 2 years, with the intent to use the Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0, making the platform code available to all for free.

Most of this is fantastic news. The economics of code sharing, value preservation of the intellectual asset, and innovation capture will be delivered through the foundation with the primary stakeholders sharing the costs. This is a perfect example of the economics of shared development in this particular market space and "why open source software."

Organization and governance of the new Foundation will be key. The foundation is open to all and membership will cost US$1500. The primary board members will share all the operational costs. This seems a reasonable way to manage the cost — it's likely much cheaper than historical royalty payments and it scales well versus a fixed premium membership fee structure seen in other places. The white paper describes the functioning of the foundation based on the following structure.

As a side observation, it would behoove Intel to get involved early on, conceivably as a primary board member and share the costs. As the mobile world of phones and laptops converge, they should be investing beyond moblin.org. That is NOT to say that the mobile world will be a single class of devices in the future, but rather the space will overlap for some time and I would think Intel would want to participate as widely as possible.

So where are the edges that need to be carefully considered in the new Symbian Foundation?

While the foundation is open to all, and the list of membership benefits is well defined today (in the white paper), one of the benefits reads: Right to access and modify foundation source code, and contribute code to the foundation. This needs to be rethought along the lines of how the Eclipse Foundation manages committers and contributors. The Symbian Foundation is deliberately cutting off unknown sources of contribution if they make it a membership benefit. There is no loss of control in encouraging (and vetting) contributions from as wide a population as possible. Putting gates around the community early, or discouraging contributors looks arrogant and risks the community's participation and growth at precisely the time when it is most needed. Microsoft certainly demonstrated how fast you could pour cold water on a community with the Rotor project. Motorola had its early Linux community vanish. Heavy-handed control and "we know best" attitudes hampered the early critical growth of the OpenSolaris community. Who knows what sources of innovation will be cut off (and will defect to other projects) with this gate in place.
"Backwards compatibility" as an absolute goal. This is not a bad thing per se, but it feels like the backwards compatibility requirement exists to deal with a long delivery cycle — essentially asking developers to begin developing today for the open source platform delivery in two years and the promise that the investment will be protected. All complex dynamic software hits a point in its evolution where a re-write is required. (The Linux kernel rewrote the entire VM and scheduler after about 10 years of evolution with modern architectures.) Backwards compatibility becomes the challenge. But the opportunity forward MUST be bigger than the backwards compatibility option. It needs to be managed in the community, i.e. this is a community issue and a delivery time-line issue. Think of the opportunity that Microsoft took moving from the Windows world of the late nineties to the new world enabled by NT. Think of the enormous opportunity Apple took moving from Mac OS9 to Mac OSX. Think of developing a community of innovation forward like the Mozilla world and Eclipse.
The whole two-year process feels like a traditional corporate engineering culture trying to manage change around a well established product space. This would be great if this was what Symbian Ltd. was to remain (but even then it risks being a dead-end overtaken by other solutions with the coming mobile Internet wave). When IBM began the Eclipse Project, they put safe IP structures around a software base, some simple governance and a road map in place, and got on with the work. Later, the Eclipse Foundation was created as a better way to manage the inbound innovation and growth under a well defined IP regime. Now, the Eclipse Foundation and Mozilla Corp. provide excellent blueprints for what the Symbian Foundation needs to be. Nokia already has the inhouse experience to build from those blueprints. Engineering cultural change is difficult but essential here. While one wouldn't expect Symbian Ltd. to release its core assets while awaiting regulatory approval, there have to be other complementary software assets internally available that could be released as early experiments to begin to get the IT structure in place and begin the cultural learning. Two years gives Android and LiMo and even Windows Mobile too much time to erode a community that should rightly be coming to the Symbian Foundation.

These are all key issues. Cultural change is hard in any acquisition. In this case it is doubly so for an engineering team used to delivering to a particular set of customer requirements now dropped into an open source world and needing to understand how open source works and customers and users differ, as well as for a business team used to driving platform revenue and profitability that need to consider now driving platform adoption as an end goal unto itself.

The Symbian Foundation is an opportunity not to simply re-invent the mobile phone platform, but to build the most innovative shared platform forward for the coming mobile Internet. Working with peer organizations like the Eclipse and Mozilla foundations, and arguably the Android project, a stable dynamic open source platform can be created that best suits the needs of customers and consumers for some time to come. Nokia's vision and foresight open up amazing possibilities. Here's wishing them speedy success.

Nokia and the Symbian Foundation Opportunity - Part I

2008-08-24T23:53:34-07:00

Sixty days ago, Nokia announced it was buying the rest of Symbian Corp., and would then open source SymbianOS using the Eclipse Public License through a newly created Symbian Foundation. This is a great announcement. Stephen O'Grady did an excellent Redmonk Q&A analysis at the time. Nat Torkington also had cogent analysis on what it may mean with respect to Android. There was lots of other commentary, however, that wanted to portray this as a last ditch effort against Android, Linux and LiMo, and the coming wave of the iPhone. Let's step back for a moment.

This is a fantastic exit for Symbian. They're celebrating their 10th anniversary at the peak of their game with enormous market share, but there was going to be trouble on the horizon. If you saw the Symbian presentations of a couple of years ago, they all looked to China, India, and the other developing economies and assumed a proportionate claim of market share. But here's the rub — when you start talking a few dollars royalty per handset then royalties quickly fall into the billions of dollars when you consider "handsets for [India | China]". For a billion dollars, I can start thinking about other alternative operating systems and indeed that's what Symbian's primary shareholders began doing.

Motorola delivered the Ming phone into China on a cut-down Linux base. This was almost a year before the iPhone "happened" and for the Chinese market was arguably a much more useful "phone". (Full stylus input for Chinese characters — think about that and texting.) The Ming was the first 2MP pixel camera (with business-card-to-contacts-database software that worked with the camera), a media player, and came in a sleek package. This was likely just the beginning of the shift away from SymbianOS in emerging markets, especially considering there are Chinese companies working on cut-down Linux-for-mobile platforms as well.

The announcement was a great acquisition for Nokia. For on the order of two years of royalty payments to Symbian, they now own the whole asset, regardless of whether they share it. But Nokia too was considering how to best work in the open source community and using Linux as a base for around the N770/N800 series Internet tablets.

Let's look at the competitive landscape for a moment before looking at the enormous opportunity in front of Nokia and the Symbian Foundation.

The "Competitors"
The iPhone isn't competition for SymbianOS. The iPhone, true to Apple's history of profitability over market share and its cult of design and usability, is an amazing consumer experience. The complete Apple experience depends upon controlling the entire technology stack in a tightly integrated fashion. In Christensen economic models, the iPhone is a new class of product and will deliver more value to its customer target over the coming years through tight control and integration than can be delivered through standardized interfaces and components, and Apple will reap the margin benefits. That same focus on function and design also means Apple will never own 65% of the global market — it won't be producing $25 iPhones for Africa anytime soon. What Apple has demonstrated to the mobile industry with the iPhone is what the mobile web experience can be. They may have "only" sold a couple million units in their first year, but they are driving 65% of the web's mobile traffic on iPhones/iTouch devices (stat from Jason Grigsby's excellent OSCON presentation). The iPhone is an innovation example for Symbian, not a competitive threat.

Google's Android is interesting. Google wants to drive application development with Android that uses Google services to find ways to grow their ad revenue as the mobile web comes into its own. They are discovering the difficulties of delivering a handset OS — something around which the Symbian engineering team has a lot of experience. Since Google isn't actually a device company, this feels like an opportunity for each of them to explore their complementary spaces. Google application services running on a Symbian base would seem to be a win for Google and application developers trying to settle on a model while allowing Symbian to do what it does best and focus on developing a strong developer community. Since the Symbian Foundation will not be under a market competitive revenue gun, profit-centric competitive decisions are removed that might have historically put co-operating with Google at risk. Android should be an opportunity, and not a competitive threat.

LiMo was created to provide a common Linux fork for mobile. The mobile handset manufacturers have shared technology through Symbian Inc. for ten years. As the industry changed and the royalty became a problem, they all wrestled with Linux. They need a royalty free OS, but trying to integrate into the Linux community has been a source of frustration for quite some time. Things that are critically important to handset manufacturers aren't necessarily even interesting to the mainstream Linux community. Each handset manufacturer was forced to fork their own. Before Android (a company-centric platform from a non-device company) and before Symbian became open source, LiMo was likely the best opportunity for a shared royalty-free platform. The most damning thing for LiMo pre-Symbian was probably Nokia's proven ability to work in the open source community to develop the N770 without a fork. The Symbian Foundation use of the Eclipse Public License will also likely make handset manufacturers much more comfortable — the EPL IBM-lineage ensured that the hardware patent clause was still intact. So LiMo is not a competitive threat for Symbian, but the reverse is not so true.

Windows Mobile is not interesting. Microsoft has seen mobile computing coming for sometime, but there are several problems. First there's the royalty problem. Second there's the open source culture versus IP protection problem, both internally and from an external partner perspective. Lastly, there's a very subtle cultural problem. In the early days of mainframes and minicomputers, users thought in terms of a data record/transaction metaphor. The PC introduced users to a document metaphor for computing. The mobile phone space uses a communications metaphor. Microsoft thinks of the mobile phone space as a small powerful PC used to read Word documents to drive data revenues for the mobile network operators, and that's not the sort of mindset the handset manufacturers have. (Another startling statistic from Jason Grigsby's excellent OSCON presentation: 2007 SMS revenues were $100B, which is more than the Hollywood box office, DVD sales and rentals, the music industry, and video game sales combined.) So while Windows Mobile was interesting in a pre-Symbian Foundation world, it still only had a quarter of the deployment of SymbianOS, and now Symbian will be royalty free. So Windows Mobile is not a competitive threat for Symbian, but the new Symbian Foundation done right will definitely threaten Windows Mobile.

It was interesting to see almost no discussion over the past couple of months around Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition or Intel's Mobile Linux project (moblin.org). Each of them are carefully not targeting the mobile phone space but are forward looking to "the mobile internet" using in-vehicle devices and netbooks as their examples. It will be interesting to see how this space evolves as the mobile phone grows up into the space, and the laptop/notebook space shrinks down.

Next we'll look at the opportunity in front of the Symbian Foundation: Nokia and the Symbian Foundation Opportunity - Part II

OSCON 2008: Open Source Software Economics, Standards, and IP in One Lesson

2008-07-29T14:58:14-07:00

I was fortunate enough to give a talk at OSCON 2008 in Portland. I realized on Tuesday (the day before the talk) that my business tutorial slides that I normally use as a level set when consulting were just NOT going to cut it. Here are the OSCON slides:

Open Source Software Economics, Standards, and IP in One Lesson

view presentation (tags: oscon2008 ip ipr open source)

Randy Pausch (23 October, 1960 – 25 July, 2008)

2008-07-26T14:49:54-07:00

I just saw that Randy Pausch died yesterday. The world is poorer for it. I first saw his last lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on YouTube in the Fall last year. It is brilliant in helping you think about what's important in the world. He is a couple of months older than I am. Watching the video is a humbling experience. The hour of your life it will take to watch it, however, will more than pay for itself.

Developing a Standards Office for Google

2008-07-07T15:26:00-07:00

I've been thinking about this since I published the Standards Primer a month ago. In the next two to five years, Google will be challenged by a technology standards effort that it will need to encourage or manage in its mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Such efforts cannot be erected quickly (as demonstrated most recently by Microsoft), and preparations for that day should begin in the near future. Google is also in a unique position to turn the standards development process on its head.

Here are a number of ideas for how Google can plan for the future in the most flexible and cost effective manner, and contribute a unique and valuable re-think of the standards development process. Well organized, a standards function can be an order of magnitude more effective at growing or defending a company’s business.

A Standards Office for Google

There are a set of strategic questions to be answered by a standards function at Google: What standards should be developed or encouraged to reduce the friction of organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful, or to open up new areas for growth? Is Android a reference implementation? An open source community? Does it require a standard? Are there micro-format standards that would make indexing web sites, libraries, or health records easier? What standards could others be planning that need to be managed because they threaten Google customer engagements or limit growth? Is a search results standard good or bad for business?

Google has a perceived public culture around serving customers, aggressively innovating, doing no evil, and having fun. These attributes should be celebrated equally loudly in their standards function which for most companies is portrayed as staid, conservative and dull.

As with all business functions, success in the standards function is a matter of organization, preparation and execution. To succeed, you need to:

Have a strategic planning function that knows how best to recommend using the company assets to develop and respond to standards and standards-like programs and communities.
Be able to find, organize, and educate potential participants and practitioners within Google quickly as the need arises.
Be in a position to influence external participants and organizations through successive layers of trust, i.e. you need to be participating and be visible.

The following is the start of some considerations for a standards office at Google:

Organize the standards office to be a small number of standards strategy staff. This group would have the responsibility for education, evaluation, organization and co-ordination, and forward strategy planning.
Individual technical staff are generally the first group of people an organization discovers in their own ranks participating in standards. They are the first line of trust and influence. They are in the worst position when it comes to IP risk or reward. Standards practitioners often develop out of the initial group of standards participants. These practitioners are people that have an interest in the success of the standards efforts at a more organizational level and begin to see cross-standards influences.
Educating participants and practitioners is key to ensure they know how to best get things done, protect the company’s investments, and how to keep others within the company informed of status. The standards office should be responsible for developing and delivering the educational materials.
Organizing and co-ordinating the efforts of participants and practitioners is important if a company is to get the best return on the investment of having them involved. The initial participants are already building trust in their respective organizations. They are the front line and need to be supported in their roles.
Google has offices in 27 countries. This is an opportunity to build trust with 27 national member bodies in ISO. Some countries have rules about participation (you need to attend so many of the past meetings to be eligible to vote for example). Some countries are more relevant than others, because they hold particular influence as well. But Google is in a great position to begin here.
The standards team should be responsible for co-ordination with legal and corporate affairs and the business teams (product marketing and development) for standards-related efforts.
The standards office should also be responsible for monitoring ongoing activities in the standards development world to watch for particular efforts that should be joined or managed.
The standards office should develop forward thinking strategy in the standards space. Based on current products and future opportunities, what standards efforts might be undertaken at Google at what cost to best enable customers and users?

The investment need not be great. Google is in a great position to begin. But there are even more interesting ideas in the standards arena and Google is in a unique position to fulfill them.

Turning Standards on their Head

Taking a typical Google viewpoint of what could be done with infinite cycles, storage, and bandwidth when thinking about standards opens up new opportunities in the standards engagement space that come back to Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible.

Developing interoperability standards is a labour intensive process. A working group meets to debate and discuss the nuts and bolts of the specification, but that act and its attendant work have lots of friction in the system:

Meetings need to organize and track input documents, minutes, and output documents that pertain to the development of the specification that will become a standard.
Specification development is often as complex as developing complex software, where a collection of document sources (text, markup+metadata, diagrams, tables), need to come together into a single known identifiable “printable” document that is easily available, indexed and searchable.
Draft specifications need to be managed and balloted and the votes and comments from the balloting process need to be tallied, tracked and managed against document drafts.
Interpretations (bug reports) need to be managed against published standards.
Amendments need to be managed against the history and evolution of the standard specification.
Many organizations develop software reference implementations for the specification, and the source code needs to be managed as a software project as well as against the specification (and its drafts).
Some organizations develop test suites for conformance verification and validation against a standard, and again both the software itself needs to be managed, as well as the link to the specifications.

While different standards organizations exist to fulfill different missions, and so have different structures, policies, and practices, this lack of underlying consistency leads to a diverging base of information rather than a converging one. Regardless of the differing policies and practices of the standards development organizations, the friction in the system is common and causes lots of problems.

Every working group and organization tackles these problems in their own ways, cobbling together the tools and processes that meet the standards development organization’s (SDO) policies and procedures. It is labour intensive, repetitive, and best practices seldom surface across diverse tools and organizations.
History and knowledge are lost, both in process and content.
Participation in the process is limited.
Promulgation of the work can likewise be limited.
The resulting specifications that become standards are generally not accessible and searchable in a consistent way.
The quality of the specifications can suffer due to a lack of infrastructure and support.

In the end, regardless of policy and procedure tied to specific SDO, they all need the same basic toolset to support the process. Google has the building blocks in http://code.google.com and “Google Apps for your Domain” to develop http://standards.google.com providing the tool infrastructure and best practices to solve many of the friction problems faced by standards developers.

Regardless of an SDO’s policies and procedures, individual working groups can more easily deliver standards that meet the needs of the SDO and its constituencies in ways that would make the standards more discoverable, accessible, and useable. Using this as the opening olive branch, while developing a strategic standards office would put Google in an excellent position quickly.

Google is in an excellent position to begin their standards strategy function. The effort should be undertaken soon to provide the best most effective platform for success in this strategic area going forward.

A Standards Primer

2008-04-30T22:56:32-07:00

Photo by Dauvit Alexander

I have recently had several long discussions about the motivations and machinations that surround the development of technology interoperability standards. Over the past few years, I've also captured a lot of ideas and experience on the blog. I pulled it all together into one place in the following paper, "Understanding Technology Standardization Efforts" (PDF 86.2K).

For the record, I was a long term participant in the POSIX and UNIX standardization efforts. I was a working group participant, balloted many pieces of the standards and their amendments, and participated in the management of the standards effort at the IEEE as both an inaugural member of the Project Management Committee and a voting member of the Sponsor Executive Committee. I was an international participant at ISO, as document editor, and participated on behalf of three different national body delegations (Canada, U.S., UK) over a number of years. I began my participation in 1989 as a customer (working for EDS with GM and the U.S. government as their primary POSIX-interested customers), but quickly ended up as a vendor, working for MKS developing a conforming POSIX.2 implementation that formed the basis of implementations from IBM, DEC, HP, UNISYS and Sun. In 1995, I put my money where my mouth was on the importance of applications portability, standards and the coming juggernaut of NT and co-founded Softway Systems, implementing the POSIX and UNIX standards on NT to enable UNIX applications to be directly migrated to the platform. A large amount of free and open source software was incorporated into the product. Softway Systems was acquired by Microsoft in 1999, and I worked there for five years. Over the years I've been in regular contact with people standardizing C#/CLI, the Linux Standards Base, and ODF.

Several friends and colleagues from the standards world have reviewed the paper and provided excellent comments. The paper is much better for it. All mistakes obviously remain my own.

Microsoft Office 2007 and Open XML: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

2008-04-28T09:52:35-07:00

Last week Joe Wilcox (Microsoft Watch) observed that Microsoft Office 2007 apparently doesn't conform to the Open XML standard (ISO/IEC 29500) that Microsoft has rammed through the system. Alex Brown has the full test here. No surprise. I've argued for the past year that the product must have diverged from the standard under construction. It's a normal thing in the standards world as Joe and Alex observe. They each challenge Microsoft to declare itself with respect to the standard and the future of the product.

But here's the problem: Microsoft already has declared itself. Last August Microsoft commissioned a study from IDC on the adoption of document standards. The "study" names Office Open XML as the obvious favourite. "Among the XML-based document standards, Office Open XML seems to be creating the most traction in the market." In the PR push leading up to the September 2007 votes on ISO/IEC 29500, Microsoft was already equating the standard with Microsoft Office 2007. That's what the sales field will be telling customers, with graphs culled from the "report". [srw — If you really want to read the report, follow the link from Mary Jo Foley's editorial. I still refuse to give the paid report link cred, small as it may be.]

Here's more writing on the ISO adoption and next steps:
Microsoft Claims Success with ISO and Open XML Standard

Follow-up on Brad Smith Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) Keynote

2008-04-01T16:13:53-07:00

It was indeed an interesting keynote. It was not as I had feared it would be. Brad Smith did an excellent job of engaging the audience, explaining the Microsoft position, and encouraging discussion. Smith focused a lot on the diversity in the market of business and licensing models, not claiming a financial high ground (which is a first), and emphasizing shared values (pride of creation of software and what we have collectively accomplished).

The panellists did a fine job, and the audience was also engaged. (It only felt like Smith was filibustering a little in the end, burning the clock, but then he'd had a long time in front of the audience at that point being on the receiving end of the Q&A.) The mini-survey off the previous blog post did correctly predict where most of the discussion was going to be on patents and Linux.

Key points for me:

"I appreciate that respect for intellectual property is I believe a shared value across our industry." Smith made this statement midway through the panellist Q&A. This to my knowledge is the first public statement by a Microsoft executive that did not label the free and open source community as IP hostile. It is a significant public statement.
Bottomley and Updegrove did actually catch Smith out in the Q&A. I wouldn't have thought it possible, considering Smith's background as a lawyer and public spokesperson for Microsoft. Smith claims Microsoft wants its property respected, and that patent licensing is not about the relatively small revenue. He was neatly and visibly cornered at one point (to audience chuckles) because the Linux community is willing to respect Microsoft's property and actively work on a solution that avoids it.
Based on statements made in Sam Ramji's presentation the previous day, and in Brad's keynote and the answers to questions, Microsoft is trying to find solutions to the patent problems. This does not simply mean giving up the property from a Microsoft perspective, as enabling as this might be for the community at large. Smith is all too familiar with other large vendors chasing Microsoft for patent licensing revenues (and he used the Sun US$900M licensing settlement as an example on stage) to be able to understand why Microsoft should just roll over on the patents they allege Linux infringes. For Microsoft it seems it's difficult to take a step that does not appear to be reciprocal in nature.
There was an interesting discussion about Cathedrals and Bazaars at one point. Smith (Microsoft) is very comfortable having discussions about Cathedrals having licensing discussions with other Cathedrals. But that analogy (historical, relevant, and useful as it has been) also limits their thinking. They seem to only think in terms of Microsoft as a cathedral that can license to other cathedrals. They believe they've enabled the Bazaar in recent licensing statements. It seems they are still trying to understand the actual ecosystem and have been perhaps using the wrong analogy as a lens. Maybe it's time to evolve the Cathedral and the Bazaar.

At one point Smith observed that what the world wants to see is deeds not words — but that words also matter because it sets the bar against which they will be judged. There was lots of interesting things said and debated over the 90 minutes. Smith has set a high very public bar against which Microsoft will be judged. I'm hoping IT Conversations gets this recording up soon so everyone can hear what was said. [My recording is noisy and missing the first few minutes.] Congratulations to Brad Smith, and the panellists (O'Grady, Updegrove, Bottomley, Shuttleworth) for an excellent session, and of course to Matt Asay for pulling it together.

Other commentary:

Microsoft Claims Success with ISO and Open XML Standard

2008-04-01T14:06:44-07:00

"Another key factor is the fact that people recognize the broad use of Open XML in the market as seen by the hundreds of independent implementations of Ecma 376." [Jason Matusow, Microsoft Director of Standards]

Think of the confusion if we only partially implemented the HTML standard. Okay — bad example. What if we only partially implemented a railroad standard? The track gauge would be correct, but the rail width was incorrect, or there was only one rail? Or maybe the track stopped before reaching its destination. Microsoft continues to maintain the Rovian perspective that a standard with "support" (their language is improving to "implementations") rather than complete conformance is good news for the industry. In this particular case it even ignores the very conformance statement in their own standard. It's only good news for Microsoft. It means lots of people are encouraged to do partial things around documents produced by Microsoft Office 2008. The economics is in the vendor's favour, not the consumer's. It defeats the actual purpose of de jure standardization. [In the industry, we call it a vendor specification regardless of standards body imprimatur.]

We now enter the next phase of the dance. Customers will discover they don't get the benefits that they thought they bought. A customer of note [likely government] or a consortia will put together a conformance certification program around the standards in the space. Brands and certifications will be the rule of the day. Microsoft will discover it needs to actually ensure their own products adhere [formally] to the standards they produced. The Microsoft Office team will discover conformance testing to a specification is (i.) hard work, (ii.) different than normal product testing, and (iii) that their product is drifting off the very standard they launched. (The .NET runtime team learned this a few years ago and I'm betting there are still conformance bugs logged against the product as "won't fix".) Implementation conformance will become important.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." — Inigo Montoya, in the Princess Bride

Other writing I've done in this space:

Office Open XML Conformance (A Lesson in Claiming Standards Conformance) [31 August 2007]
Conformance and Certification: The ODF Standard and Microsoft's Office Open XML Specification [7 January 2007]