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Wed, 23 Jul 2008

Manager's thoughts: unused extensibility and used de-facto standards.

After some before-sleep-reading (this time DNS RFC specifications) I found, that DNS protocol is so much extensible, that is can perfectly cover not only its area, but also help in really lots of close problems. It already has (though completely unused) many interesting RRs and types, which have nothing to deal with DNS (like NULL RR, which allows to transmit binary data or TXT RR, which also is not related to DNS area). And the most popular RRs are A, PTR, SOA CNAME and MX. That's all from about 20 others. The same applies to (q)type and class (I first time read about Hesiod class for example). And DNS allows to introduce own classes, types and resource records.
It is just not used, but we could create distributed DNS system with new types. It would be really simple (and actually it can be done even without new DNS extensions).
But it is not actually needed, since people are used to have DNS just like it is.

Another example is internet video. There is de-facto Adobe standard, no matter what W3C will put into its new standard, everyone will continue to use existing one. Just because it works ok. Not excellent or perfect or whatever, it just works how we used to know.

And there are lots and lots similar examples.

People are so much intert in this questions (although I think in most areas, just because it is convenient not to do something better, when existing solution just works, even if not perfectly and even if not good), that no one will ever bother to change something dramatically, because it will not only require huge amount of money, but also changes in the way people used to think about given area, which is likely even more complex (and money-hungry) problem.

All this talk is about simple thing, I just opened for myself: when you created something completely new, even if it is not the best solution for given problem, if you will start pushing it to wide audience to be used, then you are able to get all 'the market'. That's why when you have something new on the market, where most of the users already used to work with one or another solution, (and even if your project is potentially very good and definitely much better than existing solutions) then there will not be any major gain, only single links to the completely new users.
This is probably told to the first year MBA students, but I was quite excited and dissapointed by this issue: the first new idea, when properly presented even if not the best solution for given problem, can get all the users, after which they will not switch to the new one just because they used to have it this way.

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