i was directed to this interesting and amusing snippet. it is definitely telling of the industry. nicer, standardized APIs for these and related stacks will help address this issue. however, the current momentum in the industry is toward splintering existing standards or writing rival specifications, making this task more difficult. this is occuring across most standards bodies, including the Java Community Process.
there is also, at least in certain emerging markets, a trend to ignore standards. this is partly driven by the heavy presence of startups in such markets and their lack of financial responsibility to customers. however, it is troubling that more and more startups choose to ignore or deprioritise standards. not all standards are equally affected - depending on endorsement and investment, a standard can be made de facto by one or two large sponsors. yet there are cases where even such patronage is sapped of momentum by startups' resistance to standards.
i feel there are ways to address this trend without large scale change. venture capitalists already make technology decisions as a condition of investment. rather than requiring that a certain vendor be used or supported, the vc's could do one better and require that their investments perform proper due diligence on applicable industry standards and implement these if feasible.
if a standard exists, there is no amount of proprietary advantage that realistically can be gained by competing with it. there is little if any need for a proprietary competitor to SOAP, HTTP, IIOP or TCP. any high-technology vendor really needs to differentiate on value added features and capabilities, not on a homemade version of something that already has been standardised, and thus on the path to commoditisation.
the beauty of standards is that they enable best-of-breed within a technology environment. those developing new technology can focus on their core competencies and not on rewriting the fundamentals. the responsibility for maintaining lower-level stacks can be placed on another entity, freeing an organisation from that burden and innovate to their expertise. innovators should be rewarded for what they innovate, not for what someone else has already done.
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