W3C10 Europe Keynote
Tim Berners-Lee
W3C10 Europe
3 June 2004
The Economic Importance of Standards
Tim Berners-Lee, Director, World Wide Web Consortium
We are not alone
What is missing?
- Strategy with others
- Technology development pooled
- Market development multiplied
- Market size, market existence determined
Examples of markets
- Cellphones
- Anything on the web
- Anything which plugs into power
- Graphics
- Digital photo development
- Railways
Who benefits?
- My division?
- My company?
- My competition? The first mover?
- My country?
- My business area? (do I have to shift to profit?)
- My customers?
- Society at large? (eg health sites, news, etc)
Internet stack benefits
Separate markets exist for:
- Hardware
- Operating system
- Browser
- Connectivity (IP)
- Search services
- Shoes
Standards allow different layers to evolve independently and therefore
faster and better
Difficult decision
- Plan A
- Pursue standard. Commit resources. Transition products. Work with
competitors. Encourage it to to all take off
- Plan B
- Continue working in isolation. Keep proprietary control of
customers.
Decision Difficulties
Participation costs
- Strategist participates in standards planning
- Experts participate in standards group
- Product development aligns with upcoming standards
- Marketing of new standards
Participation direct benefit
- Strategy is informed by community
- Expert effort is multiplied 10-100 fold
- Product development may use shared codebase
- Marketing effort is multiplied
How do you measure the cost
- ... of the US still using feet and pounds?
- ... of power sockets being different all over Europe?
- ... of US cellphones not being GSM?
- ... of the first WAP not being an open Internet platform?
- .. of the / in MS-DOS being backwards?
- ... of U Minn asking for a fee for Gopher in 1993?
Sometimes you can
- 1993: Gopher traffic exponential increase, outstripping HTTP
- Spring 1993: Email from University of Minnesota
[source]
IT User benefits
- Avoid vendor lock-in
- "Give me my data back" - Bosak
- Access for all -- accessibility, new devices
- Unexpected reuse (Web)
- Cross-application integration (Web Services, Semantic Web)
Summarizing
Where the network effect holds,
|
Costs |
Benefit (standards fail) |
Benefit (success) |
Plan A |
- Standards group participation
- Product transition
- Standard promotion (?)
|
- conformance to a sidelined standard
|
- Market size jump
- Market share jump
|
Plan B |
- Normal product development
- Normal product promotion
|
|
- Market share loss
- Catch-up cost
|
Often, Participation carries the
least risk
Working for success
- Avoid Not Invented Here and the wrong side of the competitive
ethos
- Chose launch community (size tradeoff)
- Make it open: Enlarge the multiplication factor
- Make it royalty-free: no economic disincentive
- Openly support standards
World Wide Web Consortium
Global organization for a global infrastructure
- Users, Vendors, Academics meet
- Pool investment of energy
- Forming consensus: hard work but invaluable
- Process and patent policy honed over 10 years
- Decentralized architecture
Opportunity: Mobile Web
Source: T-Mobile, modeled on Credit Suisse First Boston, Mobile
Data 2004, Pyramid Research, Global Mobile Capex Handbook, August
2004
Opportunity: Web of Rules
- Lack of standard for production rules in business rule systems
- Vendor lock-in
- Major cost for users dealing with multiple parties
- Semantic Web
- Express knowledge as rules
- Combine across applications and enterprise
- Unexpected reuse
- Rules language needed for Semantic Web data
Opportunity: Semantic Web for Life Sciences
- Major data integration challenge
- Stovepipes: Genomics, Proteomics, bio-pathways, chemical, regulatory,
clinical trial, etc
- Semantic web technology for data integration
- Patchwork of applications connected at the edges
Conclusion
The opportunities presented by new web standards are greater than ever
before.
W3C after 10 years has the right model to realize them.
Next Session
The Policies Shaping the Web in
Europe by Eric Velleman (Bartimeus), Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin (French
Council of State and Internet Rights Forum), Peter Brown (European
Parliament). Moderator: Gilles Kahn (INRIA).
All W3C10 Europe Sessions