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How Standards Bring Consumers Choice

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This is an essay on the choices that standards enable. By laying out a framework for ensuring interoperable, interchangeable and substitutable components, standards make it easier for you, the consumer, to shop with confidence and take full advantage of the choices offered in the marketplace.

Let’s take the humble floor lamp as an example, and look at some of the standards that govern its design, and the choices this enables for the consumer. In the United States, many of the parameters for electrical fixtures are governed by standards promulgated by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA). Some of these standards are approved by ANSI or the IEC as well.

Let’s start at the wall. We see here a NEMA 5-15 Type B 3-Pin duplex socket. As you may notice, the left slot is slightly taller than the right one. This is the neutral. The live line is on the right, and the ground is on the bottom.

This socket is rated for 5 Amps at 125 Volts. The definition and calibration of the Amp and Volt and other key values in the Metric or SI system of measurement are standardized by the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM).

From the lamp we have the male end, an AC power plug. On my lamp the connector is a polarized, ungrounding NEMA 1-15P plug.

This is an electrical cord for the lamp. The codes indicate that this is a SPT-2 , #18 gauge flexible cord. SPT (Service Parallel Thermoplastic) is a standard defined by the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and approved by Underwriters Laboratories (UL). The gauge is measured in American Wire Gauge (AWG) units, also known as the Brown & Sharpe gauge, a standard dating back to 1855.


A critical interface is the one between the bulb and the lamp. The most-common connection in the United States is called the MES or Single Contact Medium Edison Screw (E26). This is an ANSI Standard, C78.20-2003.

The bulb itself is an NEMA A21-style bulb, with an E26d style base. It will be 134.9 mm long, 28.2mm wide at the base. The height of the conductor screw will be 24.4mm. As indicated, this is a three-way bulb, rated at 50W, 100W and 150W.

As you can see, the inputs and outputs of the lamp are heavily-constrained by a number of standards. Is this a bad thing? Is the consumer deprived for not having to worry about different plug and outlet types, or what gauge cord to use for their lamp, or what thread connection to use? On the contrary, it is a blessing for the consumer that such pieces are interchangeable commodities.

If one bulb burns out, you can replace it with whatever brand is cheapest. Or you can get a lower wattage one to save electricity. Or even get a florescent one that fits in the same Medium Edison Screw socket. You can get clear glass, soft white, red glass or black light. You have these choices because bulb standards make bulbs interchangeable.

If the dog chews on the cord and you need to replace it, there is no need to return the lamp to the manufacturer at great expense. SPT-2 cords are standard and available at any hardware store. You can simply replace it yourself.

If you move to another house, will your lamp stop working and need to be thrown out? No, of course not. The NEMA 15-5 power outlets are in every home in North America. You can use your lamp wherever you go.

What if you want to buy a new lamp next year, will you need to change the wiring or the outlets in your house to work with it? Certainly not. The power outlets are a standard will work with any lamp, the ones you have today, the old ones you buy at an flea market, or the ones you buy 10 years from now. The standards ensure interoperability, interchangeability and substitutability.

In fact, far from constraining choice, standards enable greater choice. Because the basic plugs, receptors and connectors are governed by standards, these core components have become commodities and are produced off-shore at low cost to you, the consumer. This causes lighting designers and manufacturers to compete on the basis of style, elegance, utility and features. So standards result in lower cost, greater competition and greater choice for the consumer.

These are the choices enabled by standards, and the choices that consumers want:

It is the same thing with document formats. Consumers don’t want to worry about document formats. They don’t want to even think about document formats. They just want them to work, invisibly, without problems. Of course consumers want choice, but it is the choice of applications, choice of features, choice of vendors, choice of support options, choice of open source versus proprietary source, choice of heavy weight versus web-based, a choice of buying a single application versus buying a suite, etc. A single universal file format is what makes these other choices possible, just like a choice of the Medium Edison Screw bulb leads to an affordable choice in lamp designs.

To perpetuate vendor-specific file formats is like having a lamp that requires a special plug and a special light bulb and even special electricity. It is to go through life with a bag full of adapters and transformers that you will need to apply whenever you, or someone else, needs to use your document in another application. The cost of multiple document standards is that the industry will invest in a wide variety of convertors between the formats, and this cost will be passed on to the consumer. These convertors will work sometimes, but will inevitably be slower, buggier, have less fidelity, and their availability will lag the office applications by months or years.

The choice is yours.

Updates:

2/14/2007: A discussion of one critic’s response to this essay can be read in this follow-up.

Once More unto the Breach

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Stephen Walli has a blog, Once More unto the Breach. He writes mainly about open standards/open source, with a solid business/legal angle. He also has hands-on experience with standards development in the IEEE and ISO with POSIX, and an interesting perspective from his broad experience in the industry, including working with standards and community development issues at Microsoft.

Since his blog’s title, like mine, is from Shakespeare, and he occasionally writes about ODF, I am doubly obliged to give a mention.

Looking at the posts tagged ODF, there is some good stuff. In Vendor-Speak: Microsoft and OOXML, he takes a close reading of some of the recent statements from Microsoft on standards and choice, a long-time confusion of terms that I had previously called a language game. Walli points out:

…Standards happen when a technology space matures to the point that customers are over-served and want choice to encourage competition. Customers complaining about price is the market signal. Competitors know they can collectively chase the incumbent vendor with a standard at this point, if they pick the right level of collective abstraction to standardize. This is how standards work in the marketplace. (I would hope the GM for standards at Microsoft knew this.)

A sympathy play isn’t going to work here. Customers WANT the standard that encourages multiple implementations. True Microsoft support for ODF in their Office product suite would have been listening to customers. Complaining that the marketplace is competitive while shoving your own product specification through a standards forum is naive at best and arrogant in the extreme at worst.

Another good post, is How Microsoft Should Have Played the ODF Standards Game:

The interesting thing is to look back on the number of times a vendor with a single implementation tried to win playing an overlapping standards game. Looking at the UNIX wars I remember three occasions off the top of my head where this was tried over a long period.

  • “tar wars” over archiving formats.
  • The GUI Wars where OSF/Motif and Sun’s GUI toolkit battled it out.
  • The sockets versus streams debate.

In each case, we ended up with two standards being forced upon us. In each case, the dominant technology that won in the marketplace was the one with the most implementations, with the other withering on the vine. Even when both specifications became required for an implementation to claim conformance to the single standard that included them, customers in the market used the specification which was most widely implemented every time.

Microsoft chose the wrong strategy here on multiple levels, betting against customers and the market in general. It may buy a bit of time, but will ultimately cost them more in the long run.

This is a theme that Walli repeats in several of his blog posts — the standard with the most implementations wins.

So a hearty recommendation for Once More unto the Breach, a blog that deserves a slot in your feed aggregator.

Here today, gone tomorrow

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The Ecma OOXML web site has been updated. The version of the OOXML specification which was submitted to JTC1 is not longer there. Instead we have a new version, generated on February 1st. I have no idea if the content of the new version differs in any substantial way from the older version, but it is clear that the pagination is different. So page number citations, as referenced in this blog and other places (such as the Groklaw analysis) are now incorrect.

(Why don’t I cite using section numbers? Good question. This is because the version of OOXML submitted to JTC1 reused section numbers, so a reference to “section 3.4.2” could be ambiguous.)

A more significant change is that the annexes are now zipped up with the PDF file to which it pertains. So Part 4 is now a zip file with 4 electronic annexes enclosed. This is different than what JTC1 received. I don’t believe that JTC1 NB’s received the electronic annexes at all.

Maybe when Ecma finishes deciding how they want to paginate the thing I’ll go back and update page references in previous posts. But for now, I’ll leave them as-is, which will match the version that JTC1 NB’s have received, but not the version that the public has.

I’ll close by saying that this is a bit odd for open standard, that the version that was submitted to JTC1 is not the same as what is available to the public. You would almost think that someone out there did not want public input on OOXML to be easily consumable by JTC1 NB’s.

Merely a flesh wound?

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The subject is the 19 contradictions JTC1 member countries submitted at the end of their 30-day contradiction ballot. Andy Updegrove broke the story.

Since that post came out there has been some interesting spin placed on these results, spin that I’m seeing popping up in several places. I’ll give you a few examples, and than explain why these ballot results are more significant than some might have you believe.

An anonymous comment on Groklaw:

This is a normal step in the fasttrack proces. (bypassed by ODF however) This might add one or two months to the proces [sic]. The ballot in ISO requires a 2/3 majority. Only 20% have reacted with contradictions or a question for information and Ecma can probalby [sic] satisfy a lot of those 19 by answering questions, expanding on their information and mayby [sic] amending the proposal.

A blog post from Jerry Fishenden, Microsoft’s National Technology Officer for the UK:

I’m not sure where the media are getting their information, but apparently out of the hundred or more ISO members only nineteen of them filed a response to Ecma 376 (Open XML) by the close of the initial 30 day consultation period.

From Brian Jones, whose excellent blog does worthy service to Microsoft’s perspective on OOXML:

The 1 month contradiction phase of the 6 month fast track process is now complete. It sounds like about 18 of the 100+ countries reviewing the standard came back with comments.

And finally, an eWeek article, quoting Tom Robertson, Microsoft GM of interoperability and Standards:

There are 103 countries that participated in the ISO process, and each country has a national standards body with the authority to act at the ISO on behalf of that country.

Obviously, these are their talking points. To see why this misleading, we first need to have a quick refresher on how votes are counted, according to the JTC1 Directives.

First, remember that this is not ISO per-se. It is JTC1, a Joint Committee between ISO and the IEC. Not all 100+ ISO members are members of JTC1. So it is not relevant to talk about how many ISO members there are in total. Only the JTC1 members were eligible to raise contradictions.

Second, the critical number to look at is the count of Primary Countries of JTC1, the so-called P-Countries. There are only 30 P-Countries in JTC1. You can see them listed here. If you compare the list that Andy Updegrove posted you will see that 16 of the 19 countries on his list are also P-Countries of JTC1. So 16 of the 30 P-Countries raised contradictions. The other three are Observers, or O-Countries.

Why is the P-Countries designation important? During the 5-month ballot, approval of OOXML will require that two-thirds of the voting P-Countries approve, as well as that no more than one-quarter of all votes cast are negative. This requirement for two-thirds approval from P-Countries is what makes them so critical.

Do the math. One-third of 30 P-Countries is 10. Add 1 to get 11, the magic number. If 11 P-Countries vote against OOXML during the 5-month ballot, then OOXML will fail. If some countries abstain, then this magic number goes proportionately down. Since some NB’s have a consensus voting procedure for determining their vote in JTC1, the lack of consensus could lead them to abstain from the 5-month ballot, just as it may have lead some NB’s to abstain from the contradiction ballot. So this magic number will likely be less than 11 because of these abstentions.

So, with 16 P-Countries already expressing concerns about OOXML, Microsoft clearly has an uphill battle. If the vote were held today, OOXML would fail in JTC1. To portray the reception of 19 contradictions, 16 of them from P-Countries, as being an average occurrence, or par for the course, or insignificant, is pure spin and and denies the magnitude of the rebuke OOXML has received.

A Barleywine

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According to the BJCP style guidelines, an English Barleywine is:

The richest and strongest of the English Ales. A showcase of malty richness and complex, intense flavors. The character of these ales can change significantly over time; both young and old versions should be appreciated for what they are. The malt profile can vary widely; not all examples will have all possible flavors or aromas.

Usually the strongest ale offered by a brewery, and in recent years many commercial examples are now vintage-dated. Normally aged significantly prior to release. Often associated with the winter or holiday season.

I started this batch back in November, with Belgian toasted malts (Dingemans Special B and Biscuit) and Target, Cascade and Fuffgle hops. The starting specific gravity (O.G.) was 1.112, which is one seriously heavy wort.

The previous day I had made a yeast starter, building a Wyeast #1056 American Ale 125ml “smack pack” into a 600ml starter (650 ml water 3/4 cup DME boiled for 15 minutes). For high gravity beers this is essential in order to get the fermentation off to a fast start.

After 2 1/2 weeks, the fermentation slowed enough to rack into a carboy where it sat for another month. Today I finally had a chance to bottle this, yielding 11 liters of barleywine. Final gravity was 1.034 giving an estimated ABV of 10.3%, a potent brew indeed. By way of reference, Budweiser is 5%.

An initial taste indicated that it was nicely balanced and hid the high alcohol levels behind the maltiness with forward hints of licorice, vanilla and plum. I will let it bottle condition for another 6-months or so before trying again. This will be a beer to sip and enjoy for several years.

Note that no licorice, vanilla, or plum was ever added to this beer. It is pure beer, according to the German Reinheitsgebot — nothing but water, malted barley, hops and yeast. The rest is the magic of biochemistry, the enzymes released during the malting of the barley that convert the starches into sugar, the carmelization of these sugars during the roasting of the barley, the alcohols and esters produced by the fermenting of the yeast. Even after the yeast has done its work and settled out, the beer will continue to evolve and change over time. Compare the complexity of a serious, living beer like this to the mass-produced, always-the-same pale lagers that fill the store shelves, and you will never go back.