|
|
| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
| |
| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: GISList: Interior e-gov tack irks GIS vendors (Geospatial One-Stop initiative) |
| Date: |
04/24/2003 03:30:00 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
|
|
>
> > Isn't history and inertia against such efforts, however well intended
> > ?
>
> Sure it is. Standards take incredibly much longer to establish
> than anyone would
> consider reasonable from a technical point of view. There is such
I'd disagree. Standards that are effective and make sense take off like
wildfire - look at the use of mp3's to swap music, for example. On the
other hand, I would agree with you that bloated, inefficient standards that
make life difficult for users and serve only to protect the commercial
interests of legacy vendors do take incredibly much longer to establish.
The music recording industry's attempt to establish "standards" that prevent
users from copying music is one such notorious example, and OGC is shaping
up as yet another such notorious example.
The reason OGC standards are going nowhere is that most GIS users want fast,
modern, effective GIS at very low cost (GIS users understandably want to be
a part of the wonderful price/performance revolution that has swept almost
all other areas of computer hardware and software) and using OGC is the
opposite of that - it's a formula for slow, overpriced, inefficient,
bureaucratic products that don't make sense for most users. That a few
organizations with a penchant for organizational bloat and Severe Budget
Wastage Syndrome ("SBWS"... pronounced "s-bws") are fond of going to
meetings at which "standards" that no one uses are invented is not the
wildfire effect that rapidly wins the hearts and minds of users.
> just valuable, but so common sense that you simply don't realize them any
> longer. Screws, disks, PCs, protocols, data exchange formats...
Setting aside those examples not relevant to how high tech standards emerge
(screws), let's not re-write history: for the most part those standards that
populate our tech world were rapidly adapted, at times quite literally
overnight, because they made sense and were very convenient at the time for
achieving maximum price/performance. Centronics parallel ports, for
example, were universally adopted by the printer industry within a few
months, as were the various standards surrounding the Wintel clone
architecture.
[I apologize for piling on against OGC, but this lame excuse of "standards
are so hard to establish" in lieu of touching base with the reality of OGC's
leaden unpopularity irked me into penning this missive...]
Regards to all,
Dimitri
To unsubscribe, write to gislist-unsubscribe@geocomm.com
________________________________________________________________________
GeoCommunity GeoBids - less than $1 per day!
Get Access to the latest GIS & Geospatial Industry RFPs and bids
http://www.geobids.com
Online Archive of GISList (and numerous others) available at:
http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/community/lists/
Setup a GeoCommunity Account and have access to
the GISDataDepot DRG & DOQQ Catalog
http://www.geocomm.com/login.php
|
|
Sponsored by:
For information
regarding
advertising rates
Click Here!
|
