Re: Industry Standard's Net 21

Gregory Alan Bolcer (gbolcer@endTECH.com)
Thu, 24 Jun 1999 12:18:50 -0700


Mark Day/CAM/Lotus wrote:
>
> I also went "what the #@%&?" when I saw Marc Andreesen as runner-up to
> TimBL in the category of "Most influential standard-bearer." The longer
> explanation of the category is "the person most instrumental in
> establishing the Net's conceptual framework." Without even thinking hard, I
> can come up with a dozen people who are better candidates for runner-up.
> Mercifully, the associated article is entirely about Tim. I don't think I
> want to know what the Standard thinks Marc's "conceptual framework" is.
> The <blink> tag, perhaps?

I'm not sticking up for him, but...

being subservient to big blue, you'd think that you'd be interested in
how companies build Net applications. You forget, there's a lot of work
that had gone on behind the scenes at Netscape coming up with a standardized
Net application architecture. Standardization using Javascript, LiveConnect,
Internet Foundation Classes (IFC), Netscapes stanardized Plug-in interfaces,
integration with IIOP, integration with LDAP, integration with SMTP,
integration with calendaring and scheduling, integration with security
media types and protocols. A majority of businesses would argue that
standardizing on one set across a whole slew of protocols has made their
collective lives easier. So, maybe they are using a different definition
of 'standard' that what it typically means in the Internet/Web world. That
doesn't mean it didn't have a huge effect in how companies went about
using Web technologies. The collective assembling of a wide diversity of
protocol standards has had more business effects than any single one, plus
it's much easier to tout an already touted posterboy.

Greg