Everybody Has A Share

Data standards in cars

"It turns out that every car sold in the U.S. since 1996 provides a standard interface to the fault management system." -- Ken Gibson, April 2005

Easier to change the browser than all Web pages

"I find the [Live Clipboard] as conceived by [Ray] Ozzie a little silly myself. Why can't this just be a built-in function of the browser? Why do we need to modify every page to enable the transfer of specific chunks of data" -- Adam Green, March 2006

Better interoperability through compilation

"Enough people are writing software in the world today that you are going to get complexity, and if you try to replace that complexity, you will fail...a level of interoperation is something you can compile away." -- Richard Soley, May 2006

Real world trumps theory

"XForms is the semantic counterpart to Ajax. But currently XForms' semantic advantage is equal to its practical disadvantage. And since the real world wins from theory, I guess we'll have Ajax for a long time." -- Anne Van Kesteren, May 2005

Specifications aren't standards, part 2

"The specifications published by the W3C are not standards, and the W3C is not a standards organisation. It's an industry consortium that publishes open specifications. In fact, it's intentionally constructed in this way; Tim Berners Lee intentionally avoided making it a standards body when he set it up." -- "Jim", commenting on IE Blog, February 2005

Mobile, but not as open

"As much fun as it may be to tweak Microsoft, or dream of open source breaking the Microsoft monopoly, the fact remains that mobile monopolies are tighter, bigger (in terms of units) and under much less threat from open source programmers." -- Dana Blankenhorn, August 2005

Wanted: Good plug-in phone software

"Why doesn't the phone provide for a timed period of not ringing (which could have an intelligent default and be easy to override) after which it automatically reverts to ringing again? ...if my phone's software was like Firefox in the sense of having a good plug-in architecture fox extensions, I could do this myself." -- Mitch Kapor, April 2006

That throat you're choking may be your own

"Reliance on a handful of vendors may not be in your best interest...IT departments should hedge their bets." -- Laurie M. Orlov, January 2008

Power vs. simplicity

"But the question Google, Facebook, and Mozilla have not finished answering is how the power of open can be balanced with the simplicity of closed." -- Saul Hansell, June 2008

Specifications aren't standards

"From my point of view, almost everything that is called a 'standard' by the technology press and pundits is really just a specification." -- Dare Obasanjo, April 2004