On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Benjamin wrote:
> cHTML vs WAP is not a good analogy, as this time the Japanese chose a
> standard.
I find this disingenious. It's quite easy to argue that WAP and SMS are
(or were) "the international standards" as that's what everybody else
decided to standardize on for mobile phones, while the Docomo folks
decided to "go it alone" with cHTML and e-mail. I expect that if WAP
had not failed, we'd hear you saying that Docomo was "s-t-u-p-i-d"
not to go with those standards, either.
At any rate, my complaint is not you saying in hindsight that going one
direction rather than another was not a good decision. My complaint is
you saying that "doing such-and-such was s-t-u-p-i-d." That's really a
completely useless thing to say. Instead point out *why* that decision
was made at the time, and what could have been done on the parts
of all parties to avoid the problem. (The standards-makers have the
responsibility to make standards that are going to be as acceptable
as possible world-wide, and it doesn't take more than a few months in
Japan to see that standards-makers often couldn't give a flying ----
about whether their standards will work well in Japan or not.)
> It would seem there are some poeple who'd like to protect their personal
> holy cows....
The whole issue is hardly a personal holy cow of mine. I just find that
you run around slamming things as dumb while providing no insight into why
the decision was made that way (aside from some people, maybe an entire
nation, being idiots) and how we can avoid such problems in the future.
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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Received on Wed Aug 1 11:45:36 2001