On 5/31/12 10:44 AM, John F Sowa wrote:
> On 5/31/2012 10:12 AM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
>> Funnily enough, the World Wide Web + Internet are still playing catchup
>> with Unix :-)
> I hit the send button before I commented on this point.
>
> The problem with the W3C is their method of voting. They hoped
> to be very democratic, but the net result is that the experts
> get drowned out by people who don't understand the issues.
> For standardizing HTML, they just made minor fixes to what
> had become a de facto standard. That's fine.
>
> But for the SW, all they had was some vague guidelines by Tim B-L.
> Guha wanted to use LISP notation for RDF. But the voters were
> swayed by the deceptively simple idea of using XML. The result
> was a hopeless kludge that created 14 years of stagnation.
>
> In a democracy, the experts can only win if they get enough
> time and resources to demonstrate that their ideas work.
> The founders of Google couldn't get a paper published
> about their page-rank algorithm. But they were lucky
> to have an incubator position at Stanford.
>
> Note that Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple because he
> couldn't convince the CEO he hired that it was time to
> replace the underlying OS of the Mac. But Steve was lucky
> to have enough cash from his previous job to build NeXT.  (01) 
And NeXT lead to the World Wide Web . Trouble is that Steve Job's other 
side (the very proprietary and lock-in aspect) would never have lead 
NeXT to the World Wide Web. Thus, TimBL basically picked up the Job, so 
to speak.  (02)
>
> Of course, not all Geeks are successful. That is why it's
> better to fund multiple small projects instead of putting
> all the eggs into one basket. The single biggest mistake
> of the W3C was a premature standardization before they
> had any idea of how the SW was going to work.  (03) 
Sure.  (04)
I think (hope) they've learned some valuable lessons from that experience.
>
> John
>
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>  (05) 
--  (06)
Regards,  (07)
Kingsley Idehen 
Founder& CEO
OpenLink Software
Company Web: http://www.openlinksw.com
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