I suggest that we need to do a bit of market research. Unless we have
a way of determining consensus on the value of any given use case,
simply enumerating the use cases does not contribute to a cost/benefit
decision.
How do we go about this? Is it possible to quantify cost and benefit? What
are the dynamics? How far is investment in LMAP "speculative"? How do we
weight the responses we get from MR? Do we need to get *everyone* onboard
from the outset? Or just a few key players? Is there truly a single market?
In a sense, the only rational form of MR is to take it to market and see
what happens. I appreciate that this is exactly what's been done with SPF.
It seems to me that this experiment is revealing exactly what one would
expect: there are a number of early adopters and a tremendous difficulty in
penetrating the mass. It may be that it's not the number of deployments
that's important but rather the volume of mail / number of inboxen covered,
in which case we're not so concerned with providing all the facilities that
*everyone* wants, but rather those which the key deployments *need*. Who
are the market makers?
It looks to me like LMAP is a fairly complicated game. If it wasn't for
what we know about organisational inertia and resistance to change, it
might be impossible to predict the outcome.