Bar none the hardest problem in standardization is getting the community of users to adopt the standard. This is a social engineering problem. This is an economic problem. It is not, mostly, a technological problem.

Here is a beautiful example of that. An example I like because it so nicely complements another standards making example – i.e. why people drive on the right.

When you pass another person on the road at night his headlights tend to blind you. There are social conventions about that, drivers know to disable their high beams. I’ve even driven cars that had clever electronics to automaticly dim the high beams (technology displacing good manners).

There is a much simpler solution. If cars and wind shields were both polarized approprately then the lights of an oncomming car wouldn’t bother you at all. All that’s needed to make that happen is to get the approprate standard widely adopted.

This idea was championed for years by Edwin Land of Polaroid. You might say that his inablity to get this simple technological fix widely adopted drove him to try his hand at a simpler problem. Instant photography – that at least was meerly a technically hard problem rather than a hard social engineering problem.

It would be facinating to revisit this standardization failure again. For example I wonder if you could get this bandwagon started in some ways that Land didn’t try. For example what if you made a kit and sold it to car buffs, they would then be able to recognize their fellow car buffs when they pass on the road. What if you gave them away free to some small communities and then sold them at cost to all the neighboring communities?

It would be an interesting experiment to see if there are tools available
to spin up cooperation that we know about now that we didn’t appreciate
back in Land’s day. Axelrod book suggests that maybe we do know some new things.

James Gosling wrote this pleasing little essay in 1990 about the phases standard setting goes thru.

It’s a nice little model with only two variables over time.

• the political demand for a standard and
• the supply of technical skills to execute on that desire.

This model was taken from Toshi Doi of Sony.  James’ point is that some standards get set before the technology is ready, while others get set after plenty of skill has accumulated.

This is a nice complement to the models that emphasis the demand side network effects around standards. Those models focus on the buyer’s problem of timing when to jump onto the bandwagon. The buyer in that case afraid that he will jump to soon and onto the wrong one and then later he’ll have to pay huge switching costs. On the other hand he’s afraid he will jump too late and be left behind while others capture the early mover advantages. Those models help explain why the demand for a standard will often runs way out in front of the supply of skills to fufill that demand.

He reaches a somewhat bleak conclusion, that we often setting standards ahead of the technology. I was reminded of this essay recently. While XML is widely used for protocol messaging the XML community is apparently lacking in a number of tools that a protocol designer would have expected. For example there is no standand way to negotiate protocol level when sessions start. For example there is no effective way to make minor revisions to a protocol and yet avoid having to spinning up an entire new namespace each time.

In turn, that reminded me how supply and demand play off each other in suprising ways. In some cases supply gets way out in front of demand. The classic dismissive phrase of business leaders for that is: “Ah, a solution in search of a problem”. In many many cases demand overwhelms supply and somebody will show up with a fraudulent solution. As witnessed by most weight loss programs, gas additives, or school reform plans.

Gossling’s bleak conclusion, that many standards emerge inspite of insufficent skill to design them well, doesn’t go far enough. There is also the common sad cenario where standards emerge years and years ahead of any demand for them.

AT&T Broadband’s privacy policy? They can release unlimited info about your browsing to third parties!

The privacy policy is an eight page legal document. The copy delivered to my house had each page reduced to one-quarter size. There is a paragraph in the middle of the document that is over a page long. The last two sentences in that paragraph have 96 words

Here is the relevant fragment of those two sentences:

… when you use cable Internet services, certain information maybe disclosed to third parties providing content or services on the … platform. Such disclosure may include without limitation … other information about your … electronic browsing …

It explicitly states that there is no limit on what information maybe released. While they have a limit on who’s included amoung third parties: they must be providing content or services on the “intereactive TV platform”. Who provides content? Do the networks, the media companies, advertisers, news outlets, and the government provide content?

Update: When I wrote this I had a web site on their cable system. Presumably back then I was one of these third parties.

Today’s chart is not a log-log graph. The horizontal axis is years. This wonderful graph is taken from William Nordhaus’s marvalous essay on the progress of computing (click here (pdf)).

Since the switch to (massless) electronics for computation this progress curve has been remarkable smooth – in the long term. I wonder if there are other progress curves with similar long term growth rates. For example is there one for the age of machines – steam, transportation, machinery, etc. – or the for measurement say. Graphs like this are generated by processes that grow a certain percent every year – 50% a year since 1940 in this case. Growth like this – in fundimental inputs to the economy – are what drive economic growth.

This sharply falling cost curve has marched thru all the industries where information handling is significant element of the biz. Each has sooner or later had to be completely disrupted and remade anew. For example along the supply chain. Huge displacments: not a lot of office supply salemen any more. Huge generators of wealth: Wal-Mart’s market cap is 243 Billion dollars.

My thanks to Brian DeLong for the pointer (click here).

I’m interested in standards, the behaviors that groups adopt which on the one hand reduce the diversity while on the other add some efficiency.

Many standards are informal, possibly the majority. Consider the handshake. Why hold your hand vertically or offer the right hand? It is not hard to make up insta-theories for these choices.

The boy scouts have a different standard handshake, the “Left Handshake”, which mirrors the standard handshake. If you are going to use a non-standard handshake people are going to react. “What’s up with that?”  And, secret handshakes always come with a story.

The Boy Scouts tell a delightful set of stories (imagine telling these in a hushed tone these around a campfire). “The chief of the opposing tribe appeared, flung down his shield and held out his left hand.” Or “The Ashanti Chief said to Colonel Baden-Powell: ‘No in my country the bravest of the brave shake with the left hand.’ So began the “left handshake” of the world-wide brotherhood of Scouts