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Technology Stocks : How high will Microsoft fly? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: dybdahl who wrote (71826)	7/31/2002 2:13:29 AM
From: technologiste	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74651

It is perhaps more interesting to note how ineffectual these efforts by governments to mandate a particular technological standard inevitably turn out to be. Could it be that government-mandated technological standards rarely succeed in the face of popular implementations? Anyone remember OSI, the global networking protocol? That government-sanctioned standard should have wiped out the Internet's TCP/IP protocol, which had little organizational support, years ago. Of course OSI wasn't (isn't?) really one standard, but, in a pattern familiar to Open Source advocates, two incompatible standards: one connection-oriented (CO) and one connection-less (CL). Rather than decide on one or the other, both were supported OSI standards. There was no OSI standard, however, for communicating between CO and CL. I guess that is one nice thing about committee-designed standards: there are so many to choose from. Or how about the ISO standard for e-mail: MHS (X.400)? An e-mail system with an addressing format so complex that you could specify an e-mail address in four distinct ways, cited below for handy reference: 1. Country (C), Administrative Management Domain (ADMD) and any of: Private Management Domain (PRMD), Organization (O), Organizational Unit (OU), Personal Name (PN) and Domain-defined Attribute (DDA). 2. C, ADMD, X.121 address and optionally, DDA. 3. C, ADMD, Unique User-Agent Identifier, and optionally DDA. 4. X.121 address, and optionally Terminal Identity Despite this amazing flexibility in specifying addresses (it certainly makes "john@acme.com" look primitive), MHS could not guarantee that your MHS e-mail address was in fact unique, and that your mail would not be delivered to someone else who happened to have the same e-mail address as you. Even so, how could such an important ISO standard, backed by the major governments of Europe, lose out to Internet e-mail, a standard which had none of MHS' features, no ISO backing, and no government mandating its use?