Some Dogs Don't Hunt. They Bark. They Are Called Watch Dogs.

I've been reading Jason Matusow's and Bob Sutor's blogs on OOXML and ODF. Two people saying exactly the same things keep coming to opposite conclusions. One has to believe there are subtexts unspoken and of course that these are market competition and co-optition at work.

Big sigh...

We're having the same discussions in the virtual worlds market.

1. A standard exists, is open, is supported, works, has ancillary support, and is actually older than what is being discussed.

2. IBM steps up to the plate to 'lead a virtual worlds interoperability forum' yet has no products, no credentials and no experience. They brought a checkbook.

3. Because of the checkbook and the recruits, the media jumps in and says this is The Future Here Now. Most of those articles are also written by people who have built no worlds, have no credentials and no experience. The brought a blog.

4. Some companies show up with solid proposals and running code. These are the companies to watch but also to buy from. Ultimately, the vote of confidence is the sales invoice. See Forterra as an example. On their interop forum they kick it off with a page terrain system. I haven’t looked into it but it was a refreshing change to see them begin with code instead of rhetoric and promises.

I don't need to go on. The pattern of waiting for solid emergence then jumping into a market with branding efforts to sell iron has been repeated many times now. Most veterans get it. If you are a startup with real IP prospects, keep your mouths tightly shut until the patent process is complete. Then take that valuable property and go work with the consortium that works with your business model. Sometimes you really do want to trade the IP into an open IP consortium where you get the trading benefits, and other times, you really want to hang on to it until you are established. IP rots so invest wisely. If you have old IP and the market for your products is aging, open the source as much as you can afford to and push the IP toward a consortium with participation agreements that ensure you will get fresh IP back.

Here's my advice to Microsoft: with the exceptions of mandates from customers such as the Massachusetts incidents, you have to stick to the old rubric "running code and rough consensus". There will always be Spy v.s. Spy battles heavily financed with layers of indirection. These are 1980s tactics and they still work to delay market coalescence, but ultimately, sales volume prevails. This doesn't mean the best technologies won, of course, just that the customer muddles through somehow.

When I sat on the BoD of the Web3DC, I fought RF too. It wasn't to get royalties. My objection was the 3D industry was at its lowest point in the market but that this would change when the then 13 and 14 year olds entered the market. Being life long gamers, they would be very 3D savvy and demand it. At that point, the market would explode and the big companies that had abandoned it would be back. Because of the problems we had experienced with Microsoft and Intel as members over tactics and IP, I felt that when this point came, they would do anything they could to lead the industry away from any consortium with RF policies and this would lead to the extinction of VRML and X3D.

That was five years ago. Today, I get to find out if I was right.

X3D is RF. The reason is because the BoD took the W3C lead (a liaison partner) which demanded compatible conditions. As a result, anyone can implement it (given skills) and any hobbyist can use it. The questions now for the big companies just entering this market are do they need the IP-free standards to get into business and do the authors accept the risks of creating content for closed systems. A third question is have the companies currently entering into this market to sell services, servers, and systems done their IP research to discover if any of the patents existing or applied for actually have value?

ODF/OOXML is a dodo war. There are too many existing formats for the outcome of this to matter. In the virtual worlds market, it matters a great deal. So the fourth question is one of architecture. As Forterra is asking smartly, should the systems coalesce around a multi-speak client or a multi-speak server? What is obvious is that there will continue to be multiple formats in both markets so any solution that begins with the statement "there must be ONE format" is a non-starter marketwise. That ship sailed a long time ago.

A Hard Day's Night

Two gents are talking about creating a Metaverse Measurement Index. A commenter worries about his/her/it being tracked. That's reasonable to worry about because that is precisely what these worlds will be increasingly used for. Selling information like that is part of their business model, If you use privately finance worlds that are publicly accessible, you will get exactly that: tracked, hacked and whacked. It is like a Google GMail account: they own your data for all intents and purposes. Free just isn't.... ever.

The troubling quote is this:

""My plan is that you get the data out there on what technologies are being used," he said, "how successfully they are, and how quickly they're growing. It's a very light-handed, market-based way of getting to the standards. If you give people the data, they'll sort it out."

There are a lot of assumptions there but they lead to the conclusion that market tracking is a way to 'get to standards' and that is a real stretch. Keep this in mind:

"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said, 'A faster horse.'" - Henry Ford.

You actually can't use 'the wisdom of crowds' to build standards. It doesn't work. That is how HTML became such a mess. There are lots of examples where 'current majorities' are simply samples of a time slice and the zeitgeist is strangely psychotic. When marketing, all of the goals are short term and these analytics make some sense (see "A Hard Day's Night" when George stumbles into the ad firm office).

On the other hand, when doing standards work, you aren't targeting short term effects. You are targeting long term behaviors. Particularly you are targeting long term persistent content because that actually outlives the hardware by a factor of ten. (Software needs about a fifteen year cycle time to recoup investment.)

My intuition is this index is yet-another-bid-for-financing and cred. Movies don't work like software and real-time 3D is a non-linear software system. Trying to mash that into Hollywood economies seems awfully near-sighted and flatlander.

Google Scares Easily

Note that the search terms in the right column have been turned off by the system and the search now returns news about Google exclusively.

That's just weird.

The Language IS The Platform

The Virtual Worlds Conference announcements were interesting. IBM, a company with no virtual world products and little experience beyond experiments made by individuals, proposes to lead a group of its most fierce competitors to create standards for intereoperability based on the ideas it has gleaned from mail lists and other sources. Will this result in a standard? Not likely.

First the market doesn't know where such a standard fits given most worlds are standalone entertainment venues with light sprinklings of business that are basically meet and greet chats.

Second the companies consulted are viewer-based platforms with server side services, not language based. The technical and political challenges of creating a standard for such as fragmented market ensure it will take some time and a lot of effort. See US DoD CALS.

Third, there is already a real-time 3D ISO client standard with applications already deployed for the military and security markets with US and European government approval and vendor support.

So what exactly is IBM after other than that their clients should sign up to Second Life or Kaneva where they are selling servers?

Time. It is a play for time to divide the market until IBM has a product or a market strategy beyond "this all looks good for business". For the pioneers in X3D, IBM is about to do to them what the HTMLers did to the SGMLers until XML was created: FUD them to death.

Here is the problem: anyone who had more than a few years of experience at this knows that there is exactly one way to get neutral interoperability and data portability: a language. To develop that as a standard among the fractured market and push it through ISO where there is an existing standard means a) IBM has to kill the credibility of the standard or b) waste ISO in the same way it accused Microsoft of doing with OOXML or c) skip the standards and try to make the claim that open source = open standards.

The real prize is 3D IP. The companies IBM has been doing business with are VC-financed and they want that IP to pay off the very hefty bills for the financiers. IBM wants as much of that one billion invested as they can get. So it is in IBM's best interest to keep the market divided and distracted while it sells servers to the competitors.

For the authors, the problem is that the language IS the platform in so far as having more than one closed market for their work. For the vendors, the problem is a language for creating content is not the same as a language for creating tools to create content. In X3D, any world you build is an 'application' of X3D. Any viewer in theory can view it and if you are stingy with the scripting, they can. But an interactive drag and drop editor plus a MU servers is another set of standards and languages.

And that is where the virtual world community is watching to see announcements. This will go on for some time to come, but as authors, you should get your head around this:

The Language IS the platform.