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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: alydar who wrote (45790)	10/6/2001 10:34:13 PM
From: Kevin Rose	Respond to of 64865

OK, I'll take a stab. First, let's start with the definition of 'open standards'. What exactly does that mean? In its purest form, I suppose, it means something like a 'copyleft', where everyone shares infrastructure source code and works diligently to improve it for the greater good. Also called 'software communism', it parallels political communism: great in concept, impossible to execute. So, does 'open standards' mean something like CORBA? Where everyone gets to through in their own kitchen sink so that you come up with a bloated, unimplementable standard? The results of which are implementations that either conform to the entire standard and don't work, or partial implementations that are labeled 'proprietary' and 'closed'. Or, do 'open standards' mean that your marketing dept has figured out that there is a customer niche that will buy it as a catch phrase? Sun killed Apollo with the 'open standards' marketing, but at the time, Apollos network was VASTLY superior to (and years ahead of) Suns. And don't get me started on the 'open standards' of IBM and Oracle. Oracle's interfaces are so damn proprietary that they could as well have been written in Chinese. Oh, sure, they will say things like 'we are ODBC compliant', but the real enterprise world does use ODBC. They know it, and have their own 'standard' interfaces (e.g. OCI). The reality is that there is no such thing as 'open standards'; only de facto standards. Something works well, everyone seems to like it, and then it gets formalized. Or, one company formalizes it, wins the market with it, and then it becomes a standard. True, MSFT does not scale to the high end enterprise. But, believe me, they are working diligently on it. They are copying Oracle's database technology, reworking the internals of MSSQL to more closely follow Oracle. For example, they recently completely rewrote the internals of their cache manager, optimizer, etc, to go after the high end market. It will take them awhile to catch up, but they will eventually. BTW: most ISV's SAY they write to open standards, when in fact under the hood they write to the best proprietary interfaces available, and use an abstraction layer to hide that from the rest of the app. If they don't, they won't achieve the scalability or performance.