From: amanda@intercon.com (Amanda Walker)
Date: Sun, 11 Dec 94 16:41:41 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: BofA+Netscape
Message-ID: <199412120041.TAA00883@intercon.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> Amanda complained that Netscape pisses all over the
> standardization committees.
> 
> Well guys, the victor has room to move.  It must come as a big
> shock to Apple, Microsoft, and IBM, but reality is that Netscape
> can set WWW standards and they cannot.

I disagree.  The WWW is no longer a research project, and if it is to
survive it will have to do so by consensus, either formal or informal.
That's what standards committees, and groups like the IETF, exist to
facilitate.

The alternative is fragmentation, which we're already starting to see
(in part because of Netscape's unilateral changes to HTML).

Let me re-iterate something here: I'm biased.  I'm a commercial vendor.
I'm perfectly happy to live by the sword and die by the sword if that's
how the market ends up--I just think it would be better for the Internet
as a whole if the actual on-the-wire protocols and formats become standards,
so that people don't have to worry about what clients or servers they are
talking to.  UI, performance, service, and such are fair game.  Infastructure
has to be consensus-based or it fails.

But hey, if Netscape can innovate by fiat, so can anyone else.  Right now,
I'm betting that Netscape will decide it's worth cooperating with the
standards process.  If they don't, they'll just fragment their own market.
I can live with that, but I think it would be a shame.


Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation