Euan Ritchie's playground

Navigation

Search this site

Login More quotes… 
Expand all rantsList rants ordered backwards in timeList rants alphabetically

How to fix bad I.T

It's quite easy to compel standards compliance

I'm getting more and more irritated by the stupidity of broken standards and non-compliance with sensible common API's across the I.T landscape. It's 2010 and we know the Internet is here to stay and a whole lot of devices are going to use it.

We know we all benefit from the low barriers to entry that allow anyone (with the skill and inspiration) to quickly advance the utility of the Internet for everyone, yet businesses continually avoid using common standards in an ongoing battle to capture markets at the expense of broadening everyone's improving situation through inter-operability.

There's an easy way to force open standards compliance on companies. All it takes is for governments to mandate them when soliciting work. Easy peasy.

The hardest part is getting sensible choices from governments about what standards they ought insist on. I think it would be a fine idea for some independent standards body to be formed to investigate those choices for governments. Email standards (including address book formats), document formats etc.