Ken,
Efforts are underway to meld as we speak, both tacitly implicit, and outwardly explicit, at the same time.
No one in either camp, with few exceptions, wants to admit this and risk losing face. So we're looking at a lot of convoluted code and word play to hide this natural predisposition to unite, IMO, but the emerging results of standards work is beginning to bear out a unification scheme, just the same.
Witness, the mapping of a CSCO ToS attribute to an ATH Forum QoS, and vice versa... running IP VPN traffic using Layer 2 tunneling protocols over ATM PVC's... that sort of thing.
It gets even more interesting when we start to look at established directory services in legacy nets, and the emerging ones used for purely Internet purposes, up until now.
Convergence of traditional forms of everyday services is causing the same kind of deference to take place here as at the lower layers. As they mutate to some common ground, they will become a new one.
From a fundamentally semantic standpoint, you are absolutely correct. But from an under-the-covers perspective, this is how I see things evolving.
I'm not suggesting that we should be looking for a declaration of such an agenda as a meld, per se, any time soon. Only that the same effects are beginning to emerge from the individual standards and governing bodies, in a mutually cognitive and combined manner, albeit one possessing a fair amount of dissonance, as we speak.
Regards, Frank Coluccio |
