Here is this week’s week in standards.
Web Standards
Mobile Apps “May Soon Be Dead”
On the day that Gartner reports the growth of the smartphone market by 85%, comes the counter intuitive suggestion that very soon mobile apps will be dead. Apps are, of course, the main reason people buy smartphones.
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This week passed was a quite surprising week in standards with a proposed scale down of the budgets for data.gov and other sites, yet another cloud standards body launched, plus other interesting views and news from the world of standards. Please feel free to leave any comments/suggestions in the comment section below.
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Welcome to the second in the new incarnation of the “Week in standards” series. I am always surprised by how much activity there is in the standards world in only a week, and this week is no exception. So here we go. Again, the goal is to provide as broad a review as possible, and please feel free to leave any feedback/suggestions in the comments section below.
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This is Part 5 in a series of articles in which contributor Stacy Baird presents and in-depth analysis of the role of governments in standards setting initiatives which is released on a bi-weekly basis. For previous instalments see here: Part 3, Part 4 – Editor
PART 5 – Not Hot, nor Cold, but Just Right… (or “Not Formal, Not Informal, but Drawing on the Best of What Came Before”): Consortia
I have been discussing the sophistication of the IT industry in setting standards as evidenced by the industry’s long history and considerable use of formal (SDO) and informal means such as patent pools. In between SDOs and patent pools resides a more recent concept commonly used by the IT industry, a truly flexible approach to standards development – where the relevant industries or businesses develop and support a standard by mutual agreement through a consortium.
In April, Talkstandards.com hosted an open forum on the topic of formal review/ranking of Standard Setting Organisations (SSO). Contributors were asked to discuss whether such review/ranking of SSOs would foster or impede efficient standardization?
Ajit Jaokar argued that any “standards for standards” effort risked the creation of a “class system between consortia” based on an arbitrary set of criteria and will only be more difficult to apply as new innovation becomes increasingly cross-domain (e-health, Mobile health, etc).
Helen Disney, arguing that the priority of an SSO should be promotion of both competition and innovation, identified the criticism that formal review creates more bureaucracy within the standard setting organisations and as such may slow change in dynamic markets such as the IT sector.
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The web has become a natural part of our everyday life. In perhaps no other area is the value of standards more evident. The Internet as we know it would not have existed without standards. Such features as global interoperability and connectivity are the result of important standards such as TCP/IP, HTML and XML. The question is if future development will be determined by markets or politics?
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Ten case studies of SSOs for the purpose of better understanding synergies between different types – formal and informal – standard setting organizations and consortia.
I have been meaning to do this blog for a while but got sidetracked due to other things.
In spite of my initial skepticism about the open web foundation, I have been enjoying participating in the Open Web foundation
For some time now, and especially after the recent debate about the Open Cloud, I have felt that there should be a need to rethink standardization going forward.
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