06.22.10
Greed Drives Technology
[Cartoon]
Corporations that can be first with a new technology have an opportunity to make vast fortunes. It is all part of the “build a better mouse trap” scenario. This keeps corporate R&D efforts active and results in the creation of small companies pursuing their dreams.
When greed is the driver, it is a wonder that industry-wide standards are ever adopted. It seems as though the definition of an industry-wide standard is more like brokering a peace treaty by a third party, non-profit, organization as the broker. After all the parties have been battling it out at great cost, they realize that establishing some rules of engagement could be beneficial to each party. Each party negotiates for outcomes that will give them the greatest advantage.
When it comes to software, things have begun to change. There is a continuing move towards openness. Individuals band together for the good of the industry to develop components and products under an open source license. These products are often better than the commercially available software.
Open software developers seem to be driven by a higher cause. They love the IT industry and simply want to contribute. Although they usually have fulltime jobs in some aspect of IT, they are driven to provide solutions to problems to help others. Some just want to make things better. Others may be looking for some notoriety. Some may want to start a company of their own. Some may want to write books on the subject.
This call to openness is changing the industry. For example: how do developers deliver 2D and 3D graphics on the internet? They have multiple proprietary solutions. There is Adobe with Flash, Microsoft with Silverlight, Oracle with JavaFX, and many other internet browser plug-ins. But, soon HTML5 will incorporate all the graphic capabilities needed. These capabilities will follow industry-standard graphic formats: SVG for 2D and X3D for 3D. All internet browsers will need to support the new HTML5 specification. The proprietary solutions will eventually fade away.
The broker for HTML5 is the W3C group. Expect this standard to take some time to be accepted. The major players with the most to lose by giving up their proprietary hold will delay the process as long as they can. Their greed will drive them to squeeze every bit of profit they can from their proprietary technology.
Closing the Business / IT gap
