Ever heard me say that? Ever been near me for more than
20 minutes? And no, I’m not talking about supersizing or the world’s
growing problem with obesity; I’m talking about technology.
In computer graphics it’s always been true, and probably
always will be. But it applies to other things as well. Take standards,
for example. Ever hear the comment, “I love standards; there’s
so many to choose from”? It’s a double entendre. It could be taken
cynically and sarcastically to mean that there are too many standards,
and on the other hand it could be taken to mean that it’s a good thing
we have lots of standards so things will work together. Sure, we’d all
like life to be simpler and easier, but stop and consider that we, in
this industry, are one of the primarily forces of making things more
complex, so you can’t have it both ways.
Nuts and bolts
In
the process of making things more complex we need to at the same time
tame them and keep them under control. I’m talking about more than just
Asimov’s three laws for robots; I’m talking about all the interfaces,
both hardware and software and hardware to software. One of the defining
moments in time was when in 1864 William Sellers (1824-1905) gave a
speech at the famous Franklin Institute in Philadelphia (and if you’ve
never visited this place I strongly urge you to go). The speech was
titled, “On a Uniform Standard of Screw Threads.” Sellers
argued that nuts, bolts, and screws were all individually made by hand,
and that they still had to be hand-matched until a fit was found. A
bolt or a machine screw made in one machine shop would not fit a nut
made in another machine shop. And nothing made in America would fit
anything made in England or anywhere else. By 1886Ð87 we had the “Standard
for the Diameter and Overall Dimensions of Pipe and Its Threaded Ends,”
and the industrial revolution took off. Back then, the machine tool
industry was like Silicon Valley is today—a driving force of the
most modern technology of the day.
Today we’re building the nut-and-bolt standards of the
cyber world. And yes, there are a lot, and at the same time there aren’t
enough. I could fill this entire issue (with small type) of the standards
we don’t have, and need. So anytime someone proposes a standard your
first reaction should be welcome and thank you. Your second reaction
should be, and what special interest group does this serve? And if you
can’t find a conspiracy or an egregious self-interest behind it, then
embrace and support it—oh, and also don’t fight it if it doesn’t
serve your egregious self-interests.
New standards by the truckload
This week we saw several new standards offered. There
was the PCI Express from Intel and its buddies, a company spec dressed
up to look like an industry standard—and that’s OK as long as the
majority of us agree to it. Khronos has got some things cooking that
will be revealed in the fullness of time, and the Intel-led consortium
Digital Home Working Group (DHWG), now known as Digital Living Network
Alliance (DLNA), came down the mountain and delivered us a 204-page
specification book, which, my cuteness put aside, is very much needed
and wel-come. And, were I not so lazy, I’ll bet I could do a little
web search and find a dozen more standards introduced this week. (I
actually did type in “new standards” and got 10.5 million
hits—no joke.)
I was asked at a recent speech I gave called “Convergence
is here now, really” how I could say that when I’ve been saying
it for 10 years? The answer is easy: convergence is here now because
of Moore’s Law and standards. For 15 years at least we knew what we
wanted to do: marry TV, audio, computing, communications, and ease of
use into one consolidated box. We just couldn’t figure out how to do
it. But boy, did we try—talk about shelfware.
In the last year or so all the pieces started to fall
in place like Legos, and one of the things to come out of it was Microsoft’s
Media Center. iPod was another, DVD recording another, and so on.
The big frontier is the handheld thingies, the market
that has so many people excited because of the huge numbers it represents.
Everyone is going to own a handheld multimedia device that can also
be used to make phone calls—our new personal companion (the real
PC). And if the industry doesn’t come together with some real open standards
it’s going to be a bigger zoo than TV or the (old) PC ever was. There
are some rays of hope with MIPI, and mobile-phone and chip makers are
under pressure to give up cherished proprietary technologies in favor
of generic interfaces for tying cell phones to multimedia peripherals
such as higher-resolution displays and cameras. Open standards made
the computer industry grow, and although it’s hard to talk to the handheld
industry about growth, the market will fragment if we can’t get more
open standards into it.
So standards: “I love standards; there’s so many
to choose from”? I say, Standards—give me more—too much
isn’t enough.
Epilog: And I’d like to lay to rest once and for
all that the honorable Mr. Sellers never did say, “Screw this”
and walk out in a huff making perhaps one of the first non-sequitur
puns.