Jesse James Garrett from ChangeThis wrote an interesting manifesto (click the download PDF button) in which he examined the San Francisco Apple Store from an "user interface" point of view. Executive summary:
Standards are important, I won't question that. There are a few problem with them, however. As Andrew S. Tanenbaum once, said,
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
This is what currently happens in the XML, and especially the Web Services community. A quick look at W3C Technical Reports and Publications page shows about 350 (!) documents - recommendations, working drafts and group notes. And this does not include all the other XML related specifications developed by OASIS and commercial organizations (Microsoft, IBM, BEA, etc.).
But the sheer number of these documents is not the only problem. The other one is the overwhelming complexity of some of those documents. It started some years ago with XML Schema which, of course, was soon followed by rivaling specs like RELAX NG, which covers about 80 % of the practical (!) functionality at a fraction of the complexity. Yeah, that old 80-20 rule, you gotta love it.
The current trend is to produce WS-* specifications at an alarming rate - as Tim Bray wrote today, we have just re-invented HTTP over SOAP (which, ironically, in most cases already runs over HTTP).
Anyone remember the charming simplicity of XML-RPC? It a really simple spec - apparently too simple for many, since it was soon followed by SOAP 1.1 (which was still tolerable) and then SOAP 1.2 and all the related WS-ShootYourselfInTheFoot, which drove the whole idea of "Simple Object Access Protocol" ad absurdum? Nevertheless, XML-RPC is still alive and kicking today - even in enterprise applications.
I see one big danger in all this. It basically prevents innovation. Why? Its practically impossible for a small company to develop a product that complies with all these specifications. Implementing all these standards is best done by a large company hiring 500 developers from India, putting them in a bunker and letting them spill out code for six months, or so.
This leads to what I call CIO-Ware - software that causes every hacker to turn away in disgust, but which CIO's really love, because it does everything you can ever imagine just "by configuration" and complies with basically every standard ever invented. Projects involving such systems typically take a 100 manyears, require 200 external consultants and are canceled after 18 months, just to be followed by something even worse. But I digress...
Basically no change for small innovative companies in the enterprise world: "but your product does not support WS-KitchenSink!", "no support for XML-BLOAT 2.0!" You get the idea.
Maybe, even in the brave new world of enterprise applications, it is time again to remind ourselves of the old KISS principle.
Amazon has done it. Google has done it. Others have done it too. Successfully.
And, coming back to this entry's title: anyone remember what happend to CORBA? The old canonical example of standardize-to-death? It got surpassed twice. First by Java RMI (again, 80 % of the useful functionality at a fraction of complexity), then by SOAP and web services. Unfortunately, the web services community has apparently chosen to pursuit the CORBA way. Let's see where we are in five years.
Breaking news! Outstanding victory for humanity in the War Against the Machines. Read it all in this Register story.
Today I received a shocking invoice from my GSM provider. For a data transfer volume of about 20 MB (basically checking e-mail over a month) they charged me a whopping 674 Euros (that would be 811 US Dollars), which almost all of it being GPRS roaming fees from various Italian, French and Spanish providers. Seems to me that due to a highly competitive market, GSM providers can't make much money from the basic telephony service anymore. Their solution? Rip off roaming GPRS customers. Shame on them!
[Note to self: ample business opportunities for WiFi hotspot operators along the spanish, french and italian mediterranean coast!]