On 5/31/2012 10:12 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
> Funnily enough, the World Wide Web + Internet are still playing catchup
> with Unix :-) (01)
I hit the send button before I commented on this point. (02)
The problem with the W3C is their method of voting. They hoped
to be very democratic, but the net result is that the experts
get drowned out by people who don't understand the issues.
For standardizing HTML, they just made minor fixes to what
had become a de facto standard. That's fine. (03)
But for the SW, all they had was some vague guidelines by Tim B-L.
Guha wanted to use LISP notation for RDF. But the voters were
swayed by the deceptively simple idea of using XML. The result
was a hopeless kludge that created 14 years of stagnation. (04)
In a democracy, the experts can only win if they get enough
time and resources to demonstrate that their ideas work.
The founders of Google couldn't get a paper published
about their page-rank algorithm. But they were lucky
to have an incubator position at Stanford. (05)
Note that Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple because he
couldn't convince the CEO he hired that it was time to
replace the underlying OS of the Mac. But Steve was lucky
to have enough cash from his previous job to build NeXT. (06)
Of course, not all Geeks are successful. That is why it's
better to fund multiple small projects instead of putting
all the eggs into one basket. The single biggest mistake
of the W3C was a premature standardization before they
had any idea of how the SW was going to work. (07)
John (08)
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