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Re: [ontolog-forum] How long to useful?

To: ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 31 May 2012 11:09:45 -0400
Message-id: <4FC789B9.3010107@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On 5/31/12 10:44 AM, John F Sowa wrote:
> On 5/31/2012 10:12 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>> Funnily enough, the World Wide Web + Internet are still playing catchup
>> with Unix :-)
> I hit the send button before I commented on this point.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.    (01)

And NeXT lead to the World Wide Web . Trouble is that Steve Job's other 
side (the very proprietary and lock-in aspect) would never have lead 
NeXT to the World Wide Web. Thus, TimBL basically picked up the Job, so 
to speak.    (02)

>
> 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.    (03)

Sure.    (04)

I think (hope) they've learned some valuable lessons from that experience.
>
> John
>
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>    (05)


--     (06)

Regards,    (07)

Kingsley Idehen 
Founder&  CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
Personal Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
Twitter/Identi.ca handle: @kidehen
Google+ Profile: https://plus.google.com/112399767740508618350/about
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kidehen    (08)

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