If your interested in internet Idenity go read Phil Windley’s most excellent series of postings about Digital Identity World. Facinating! Those postings are another sign that, just maybe, the ‘mob‘ is beginning to get it. Until the mob begins to settle in on what “it” is it is very hard to accelerate the build out.
Some people seem to organize thier standards body to almost assure a hold-up.
One fear, the fear of a hold-up, hangs over all cooperative enterprises. In it’s rawest form you invite a couple folks over for a pleasant potluck dinner and in the midst of the meal one of them pulls out a gun and threats to commit mayhem if everybody fails to turn over their wallets. In fact you could argue that this fear infects any gathering.
In industrial standards bodies the fear is that you will invite a number of experts together to set standards that enable your industry to grow faster and one of them will quietly slip a patented bit-o-technology into the standard. Later after everybody has adopted the standard he will then demand license payments. At worse he may ask a court to grant an injunction to prevent certain parties from using the standard if they don’t pay up.
Of course you can get held-up by folks you didn’t invite to the party. Burglars can climb in the window. Third parties can have patent rights that read upon any standard. The current situation with the Eolas patent is a fine example of a hold-up.
The primary reason we engage in cooperative activities is that they generate positive externalities for the participants and their communities. What is offensive about a hold-up is how the criminal can arrange to steals the value that was collectively created. In the patent examples it is entirely possible that the patent would have been close to valueless if the standard had failed to become widely adopted.
Consider a simple scenario. We want to design a standard electrical plug. Obviously, there are thousands of possible designs. So, we just pick one. Now a few years pass and millions and millions of plugs and sockets are now deployed worldwide. This standard is a success.
Because that installed base would be nearly impossible to switch (see immovable installed base) to some alternate plug design it is fun to imagine that you just happen to own a patent on the pattern used for that plug. That would make you rich! Particularly if the courts can’t see that a) the patent was valueless prior to the success of the standard and b) that standard’s success owes little, if anything, to the particular pattern selected or that even if it does the community would have designed around it to avoid the risk of hold-up given the least chance.
Of course, teasing out the value of the standard’s wide adoption, and what portion, if any, of that value arose from the patented bit is an extremely difficult the puzzle. Doing so in the face of dozens of claims is even harder. Such claims arise not just from the patented bits but from the many other elements contributed to the standard making process.
All modern industrial standards bodies include a clause that attempts to clarifies the terms that participants will have to accept before they participant. A common clause states that they will offer to license any IP rights under reasonable terms. And of course there have been court cases to argue if these “reasonable terms” are defined before or after the standard succeeds.
The hold-up problem is found in all cooperative activites. For example organizations, foundations, and web sites that aggregate the contributions of numerous volunteers such as FSF, Apache, eBay, Epinions, LinkedIn, etc all have this issue lurking in the background. The participants believe, at some level, they are at a potluck. The fear that some party will abuse the gathering and engage in mayham, even if that mayham is limited to a few pop-up ads, hangs over the party.
Solving these problems isn’t as simple as demanding that everybody be fair and reasonable.
Sadly I can’t find where I read that some 20th century sociologist divided the world into three parts: the elites, the mob, and the masses. The elites are those who transparently have great power: kings, monopolists, olograrchs, leaders of powerful political parties, mayors, senators, etc. etc – e.g. the top of this or that power curve. The masses are typically unwashed, undifferentiated, and come in great numbers – e.g. the tail of the power curve.
The mob is the interesting one. The mob are the artists, the disaffected intelectuals, the revolutionaries, the entrepeneurs. I suspect these are the upper-middleclass connectors in the power-law graph.
As a subplot of my musing about what gives a standard momenteum I’ve got to thinking that the mob is a third group you need to get on board. If the mob are the folks that enjoy reengineering how the connections in the power-law graph are made, then these are folks you need on your side if your attempting to engineer a new standard.
In some sense this is convential wisdom. Even the marvelously vapid Crossing the Chasm points out that an emerging company begins by working with the innovators who’s have both the vision and the foolhardiness to take the insane risk implicit in being the first to get on a new bandwagon.
But even much smarter folks have noticed how critical to innovation members of this class are.
Reading Paul Graham amusing rant about Java’s ‘cover’ is a wonderful example of just how cranky and substanative this class of players is. Paul is a perfect example of a member of the mob; a very wise somewhat bitter refugee from a great now nearly dead subculture of the software industry[1]. Paul’s essay, written circa 2001, argues that much about Java sets off his inner-radar in a manner that suggests he should run away.
His radar is made suspicious, for example, by the DOD’s enthusiasm for Java. DOD’s track record with language enthusiasm’s has been pretty lousy. I think that the mob is always a little suspicious of emerging standards who’s claim to fame is the enthusiasm of the either of the other two groups. The mob is suspicious of the masses, who tend to hysteria. They don’t trust the elites for two reasons. The elites often need a stern talking too and the mob loves to volunteer to do that; the so called ‘speak truth to power. But also, the mob is trying to restructure the connections in the web that creates the power-law and in doing that they fully intend to threaten the existing elites, aka the vested interests.
In anycase, if your attempting to get an emerging standard to take hold you do seem to need to tackle all three of these audiences. The skills approprate for each audience are amazingly distinctive. I have a first order theory about were the skills to do that becoming industrialized.
[1] One can dis one’s own kind.
“Believing that Lisp circa 1982 plus some mid-1980s ML tricks thrown in is better than all of the new programming tools (C#, Java) that have been built since then is sort of like being a Holocaust denier.”
In the best of all possible worlds standards are a win for everybody in the market. A public good. While economists like to get all fixated on the problem that some players freeride on the public good I find the momenteum problem much more interesting. How do you get the emerging standard adopted by enough players that it becomes a real standard?
You can’t get a standard to happen unless a sufficent number of players in the market get on board. Say you wanted to introduce a new payment’s standard, like for example a stored value card to replace pocket change. You would need to get at least three groups to adopt it; the citizens would have to carry it, the stores would have to take it, and the equipment makers would have to manufacture all the gagets (cards, readers, etc.) to make it work. Writing the standard would be the easy part – unless of course all the players show up at the committee meetings.
All these players in the game tend to hang back; with the exception of the gaget freaks and the handful of people who want to bet their companies on getting first to this new market.
The whole assorted ways of convincing folks to climb on the bandwagon get used to solve this problem.
This is a social engineering problem. One of Cialdini‘s classic ways to tackle this kind of problem is to get the king to give the entire enterprise his blessing. (see also Aramis or the Love of Technology)
These days we don’t have a lot of kings. The liturature’s solution to this is found in the Wizard of OZ. There in the fraudulent Wizard is faced with the problem of how to give the tinman a heart. He announces he has something just as good. A philanthropic metal! We have market leaders!
“On June 11, Linda Dillman dropped a bomb on the retail industry. Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s CIO announced that, as of January 2005, the world’s largest retailer would require its top 100 suppliers to put radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on all pallets and cases they ship to its distribution centers and stores. The news sent suppliers and competitors scrambling to learn about the wireless technology, which enables companies to identify and track items in the supply chain automatically.” – from Case Study: Wal-Mart’s Race for RFID at eWeek
So, one of the ways to try to build momenteum for your standard is to play the authority card. That comes in lots of flavors. You can get the authorities to say encouraging things, bless your standard, recomend your standard, require your standard, set deadlines for your standard.
This is not just about the power of the authorities though. It is also about their reputation. If Walmart says nice things about RFID that blesses RFID with some modicum of Walmart’s reputation for running a highly efficent distribution channel. If they blow it it damages their reputation.
It not just about power and reputation. It’s also about agency. If the mayor endorses a plan to revise the zoning standards he is speaking on behalf of the constituencies that elected him. Inspite of agencies many tangled aspects, because the momenteum problem is all about getting the majority to adopt, this aspect of “appealing to authority” is actually quite attractive.
All of these appeals to authority can go bad, becoming dangerous and deceptive. If the mayor can’t deliver his base then his promise is hollow. Hollow promises are deadly for a political operative; if he misleads people he’s unlikely to survive the next election. If Wal-Mart forces their vendors to adopt a standard but the rest of the industry fails to get on the bandwagon then Wal-mart’s reputation is damaged and vendors put another thing on the list of reasons why they might want to find a way to get around Wal-mart’s strangle hold on the retail channel.
In vibrant markets and political spheres we have means of goverances that can correct misleading or abusive uses of authority. In failed markets or goverments these means may take long painful periods to operate.
One sign of a healthy market or goverment is that those who appear to have authority are much more tentative in using that authority to force the momenteum of the emerging standard. That tentative behavior is the symptom that there are checks and balances in place that temper their power. That tentative behavior signals that they know their status in the system is tenous. That tenous status makes their acts less forceful, less straight forward, more ambigous. That’s good, even if it makes them seem slippery, or political.
A number of folks have been pointing out this article that argues that the movie industry get’s it while the record industry doesn’t. That maybe. But, it may also be that the real difference is that a digitized movie is a lot larger than a digitized pop song. It might be because the movie industry managed to get at least a modicum of digital rights management into the DVD standards. Boths these certainly limit the moblity of the bits and gives the movie mogels more time to resolve their problems.
But I think the real difference is that CD writers are standardized and very common, while DVD writers remain a standardization mess and so they remain rare.
It maybe that the success of the movie industry in this game arises entirelfrom their success at delaying the standardization of writable DVDs.
Tim Bray has a thoughtful posting about the blog newspaper editting process. He points out that the online blogging world, and even the New York Times, revise postings overtime.
Newspapers have always done this; revising the paper’s content in response to newly arriving info from all three sources: the editors, the situation, and the audience. Papers have always had multiple editions. Papers are not the
permeant record. Newsprint isn’t particularly scarce. You wrap fishes in it.
Book publishers and academic journals don’t do this. The act of publishing and distributing a book or a journal is sufficently scarce that they are forced to front load the editting.
The scarcity of the media and channel is the fundimental force driving the editorial industry, but not the only force. Curiously most editors think their purpose is quality control. This is a classic confusion of supply and demand. The demand that editors fill is the need to manage a scarce channel – to make choices about what get’s sent down that scarce channel. To solve that problem they have standardized on a particular sorting scheme – the editorial process – and, of course, they sort for quality. Quality is, of course a very multidimensional thing and the editorial process of any given person or institution draws one some subset of that.
Blogs like mail and web pages, are totally outside channel scarcity problem. The demand that gave rise to the editorial function is obsolete. The absense of scarcity allows numerous kinds of quality to emerge.
Yesterday we acquired a button from a group that’s working against the authoritarian fad for standardized testing: “There is no such thing as a standard kid.” There are no such thing as a standard blog.
Notice this, an interesting species of standards war.
The companies in the ZIP file compression business seem to have decided to play a few rounds of MAD (Mutually Assured Distruction).
Some registries:
Apparently there is no place where I can register that my body parts are large enough, thank you.
Registries try to solve a coordination problem, a search problem, a certification problem. But they only work well when they achieve sufficent scale to capture the network effects that make them valuable to their users. A successful registry becomes a standard; the standard way to answer a some class of questions. EBay has managed to do that for junk.
Registry design gets a lot more interesting when you want to control who’s
allowed to know what when. It gets more interesting when you start trying to standardize broadly what questions people can ask.