Article

Greg Papadopoulos, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer

Here's how the Economist assessed the information technology industry in 1993: "The noisiest ... competitive battles will be about standards. The eyes of most sane people tend to glaze over at the very mention of technical standards. But in the computer industry, new standards can be the source of enormous wealth, or the death of corporate empires. With so much at stake, standards arouse violent passions."

Eight years later, that assessment rings truer than ever. With the birth of the World Wide Web (and the phenomenal growth of the Internet), openness has become obligatory and interconnectivity essential. It is accepted today that businesses and individuals buy computers for access to the Internet—yet ten years ago, there were no URLs posted on advertisements and people bought PCs because they had "personal productivity tools." Likewise, home e-mail was for daring technical innovators, while today, DSL and cable modem services are fighting it out with advertisements on "golden oldie" radio stations. Cellular phones were confined to bulky car units, and the term "mobile Internet" was a nonsequitur. Today it's hard to find a business article that doesn't combine "e-" with commerce, marketing, strategy, or business.

While all of these markets have resulted from the successful application of technology to a problem, they all depend on standardization for their growth and success. Try to imagine an Internet composed of multiple, competing, and non-interoperable networks—it was tried and it failed. Imagine a Web without HTML, or with multiple variations of it—something else that was tried and failed. The whole concept of a "networked anything" requires that egregious difference be sacrificed—that vendors be willing to work together to establish a market in which they can later compete.

All market participants—from vendors to users—participate in standardization in some form. There is no longer an "opt out" option; if you are not part of the standard, you are not part of the network. But the discipline of standardization has changed over the past ten years, moving from a reasonably modest niche discipline to a practice that is center stage within the information and communication technologies (ICT) market.

At the same time, there have been important advances in the understanding and practice of this discipline. Many of these are the results of quiet (and sometimes not so quiet) practitioners and theoreticians of this somewhat arcane discipline. Because Sun believes that exposing these ideas early is necessary, we are starting this column on the standards page of Sun's Web site—a column devoted to opinions, theory, and findings about the discipline of standardization. Standards done in stealth mode are not standards—they are futile. By providing a place for discussion, Sun hopes that we can help this discipline grow so that the ideal of an open Web, accessible to all, can be achieved.