(keitai-l) "The nice thing about standards..."

On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Benjamin wrote:

> Fair enough. However, the difference between WAP and PDC is that WAP was
> defined and adopted by many countries....

Yeah, and it still failed, perhaps in part because of the pricing
model, but also I argue, at least in part because it intentionally
broke away from interoperability with existing, widely-understood, and
widely-used standards. In other words, they did something you refer to as
"s-t-u-p-i-d" when the Japanese do it.

In essence, what I'm tring to point out here is that which was "the
standard to go with" and which is "the breakaway" is in many cases more
a matter of point of view than anything else.

"The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from."

Now: not agreeing to implement and use international standards that
work for everybody in the RF spectrum area has led to notable lossage,
but not just in Japan. I wouldn't mind not having to carry around a
tri-band GSM phone that weighs half a tonne if I want to roam between
Europe and the US, for example.

On the other hand, there's no question in my mind, as someone who's had
to work on development of a site that runs over standard HTML, i-mode
and WAP, that avoiding WAP and using cHTML instead was a big, big win.
Blink's i-mode site was available long before the WAP site, and cost
a heck of a lot less to build and maintain. And as a plain old user,
I really like being able to get at least limited functionality from web
sites not designed for i-mode, not to mention being able to create my
own personal i-mode pages without having to order a pile of expensive,
proprietary "standards" documents.

I can't say whether the huge advances in cellphone size, weight and
functionality were helped or not by not going with international
standards, but if they were, I certainly consider it a worthwhile
tradeoff. Since I rarely leave Tokyo, I'm very happy to give up
international roaming for a cell phone half the weight of one I'd be
using in the US or Europe. I suspect a lot of other consumers here might
feel the same way.

So I don't think ranting about not adopting certain standards as
"s-t-u-p-i-d" is really very useful in terms of analysis of the situation.
It makes it appear as if there is was no advantage whatosever to
the course that was chosen when often demonstrably there was, if you
just look a little more closely. Noting the tradeoffs made and the
advantages and disadvantages that are likely to be accrued on both sides
is useful. Knowing why the decision-makers felt, at the time, that it was
better to take their own course is extremely useful knowledge to have
when you're trying to come up with the next one-hopes-international
standard. Then perhaps you can avoid creating a standard that's so
difficult for some parties to adopt that they don't do so.

And sorry about the typo in my last post; I did mean to type "pre-Meji,"
but who proofreads e-mail? :-)

> I know this one is off-topic but quite interesting: I saw a feature on NHK
> 1 the other day, in which the Japanese themselves criticised the Japanese
> industry for not adopting international washing machine standards....

Well, I wonder about that. Japanese washing machines are rather different
from North American and British ones. Putting a domestic Japanese machine
in a U.S. home would be ridiculous, and putting a domestic U.S. machine
in a Japanese home would be impossible. This would be another situation
which requires a bit more looking-into before announcing the decision as
"s-t-u-p-i-d", I think.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson <cjs@cynic.net>  +81 3 5778 0123   de gustibus, aut bene aut nihil
	    "The chain which can be yanked is not the eternal chain."
			    -- G. Fitch


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