More feedback on my comments around standardizing the WS-* specifications. Unfortunately, the author of these comments, Fumiaki Yoshimatsu, seems to be making huge and wholly incorrect assumptions regarding my motives and opinions about standards. I will try one more time to correct these misunderstandings.
I think about standards only in terms of customers, not in terms of vendors, or in terms of standards for standards' sake. Those who know me know that I really can't stand working on standards, partially because too many "standards professionals" are so far removed from actual customers that it's hard to hold fruitful conversations with them.
As Sean McGrath already succinctly and correctly pointed out in response to one of my earlier blog postings, users, not vendors, drive standards. To this end, however, customers often ask their vendors to help drive standards for them. Right now, for example, I'm working on three separate OMG standardization requests from customers, one involving CORBA reflection, one involving WSDL bindings for CORBA, and one involving a C++ mapping for WSDL. Our customers have demanded standards in these areas, so we're working to provide them.
About two years ago IONA hosted 30 or so of the SOAPbuilders here in Boston for an interoperability testing gathering. Why? Because our users were using our tools along with those from other providers, and they wanted assurance that the various tools worked together. This is exactly the kind of user-focused standardization IONA has been involved in from the day we started in 1991.
So, I hope Centaurs Identity will stop putting words in my mouth (or in my blog, as it were) regarding standards. I can be accused of many things, but being a self-serving standards person with no attachment or understanding of the customer is certainly not one of them.
Comments (1)
One thing I have to make sure is that I didn't by no means want to accuse you. If I have read your blog wrong, and/or my English writing skill has been bad, then I am really sorry about that. I don't mean you and your company are not doing good jobs for your customers (I don't know the fact anyway). What I wanted to say is that I believe we are in the era of users, not vendors. I believe it does not really matter if an evil vendor ships proprietary standards, because there is always another choice for customers. Your company is surely included in the choices I am sure, and because that is where you and others compete, customers can and will make the right choice no matter how evil the shipped standard is. I wrote the entry because I believe IT vendors should compete in the quality of software, not the quality of specification because specification does not run. Anyway please accept my apology. I am terribly sorry if I hurt you and someone around you.
Posted by Fumiaki Yoshimatsu | March 29, 2004 9:22 AM
Posted on March 29, 2004 09:22