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Standards, innovation, Flash, ownership and all that

It’s often argued (well, asserted might be a better way of putting it) that standards are an anathema to innovation, or at the very least a significant impediment to it.

At its most extreme, this is used as an argument for disbanding the W3C, and even for core web technologies to become “a single source repository [with] a good owner to drive it.”

Occasionally history throws up curiously timely experiments. Right now we are seeing a very interesting one (and one with far reaching consequences) play out.

Since the middle to late 18th Century, with the enclosure of the commons, and the rise of industrial capitalism, the belief that ownership and property rights is what has largely driven advancements in our civilisation has become almost all pervasive. It lies at the heart of the, until relatively recently alien, concept of intellectual property (increasingly seen as a bane not boon for innovation).

So, what does this have to do with the clear demise of Flash on mobile? Flash has an owner. One that had, and continues to have large revenues, teams of very smart people, deep pockets.

Despite all this, Flash failed to adapt to changing technological circumstances, and withered on the vine.

In parallel, core web technologies have slowly, inexorably grown more sophisticated, organically, iteratively, cooperatively adding capabilities that, for the most part developers clearly want and need.

Let’s take an example I used in a recent presentation. The DOM, while powerful, has long been a pain for developers to really get to grips with. Recognizing this, various libraries, and most famously jQuery, came up with more developer friendly ways of accessing it. jQuery’s use of CSS selector concepts proved immediately popular, and in short order, the W3C began work on the Selectors API, while browsers also within a relatively short time frame began implementing this API.

An ownership model is different. The owner of a platform or technology makes strategic decisions, and long term bets on what will be successful. Those bets may of course pay off tremendously (as in the case of iOS). But they may not, and very often do not, as in the case of Flash.

Standards bodies are not imune to the ownership model of development. XHTML2 is a decade long demonstration of that.

Technologies with the ownership model seem less capable of adapting to change, and are very dependent on initial conditions. The cooperative, collaborative standards based approach (characterised best by the IETF’s founding principle of “rough consensus and working code”) often seems to build technologies that weather the storms of technological, social and political change far better.

It’s ironic, that the apparently “capitalist” “ownership” model is really much more like the central planned economic model of former socialist countries, while the W3 model more closely approximates how the societies of economically liberal countries work.

Neither model is going away soon. Each will have its successes and its failures. But I think it is time to put to bed the far too pervasive meme that standards are in some way an impediment to innovation. After all, take a look at the web. Built on standards (TCP/IP, http, HTML, CSS, EMCMAScript, the DOM), it’s doing ok. Better than OK I’d suggest.

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