On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 01:31:34PM -0600, Dustin D. Trammell wrote:
| has much clout and much funds to put behind SPF. Do they have any
| technical reasons? The only technical arguments FOR XML that I have
| seen have come from a few people on the list playing Devil's Advocate,
| or the few that like XML and want to make sure we are not mis-informed
| on the pro's and con's, but it seems that even those feel it is probably
| the wrong technology for the job.
There is no one reason the Mystery Stakeholder is behind XML.
Partly they are promoting their pet technology because they expect to
see it everywhere five years from now, and why not do it here too?
Partly they are promoting it out of convenience --- maybe they may
already have an XML parser inside their MUA and a working implementation
based on XML, so it's less of a hurdle.
Partly they are promoting it because it furthers their business
interests at the potential expense of their competition, which is
simply what corporations do. It's a pain in this case because the
Mystery Stakeholder has so many business interests their competition is
pretty much anybody who's not them.
I have a new appreciation for professional politicians. Stopping spam
is something that everybody wants, and we see how hard it is. Imagine
doing something that lots of people *don't* want.
Now, what is our goal? If the goal is to stop spam, then we should
allow the expediency factor into our arguments. The Mystery Stakeholder
controls the desktop and they are so well integrated that they can roll
out their antispam technology across their entire product range,
comprising the MTA, the MUA, the ISP, the webmail portal, etc etc.
Voila. They could do it, and it would be done, at least as far as their
market is concerned.
Except the Mystery Stakeholder will encounter a lot of resistance from
the people who actually have to implement policies in XML. The admins
have spoken and they don't like it one bit. They hate spam, but the
Solution doesn't smell right to them, and they'll hate being forced
top-down, to implement it.
SPF has the advantage of smelling right, and there the admins will be
the ones pressuring their managers to publish.
Maybe our goal is to stop spam in accordance with the cultural norms of
the Internet community. You ignore culture at your peril. They teach
that in all the MBA classes on international management. When you don't
absorb those lessons, you get accussed of imperialism. The Mystery
Stakeholder is no stranger to those accusations.
But what can we really do against the Mystery Stakeholder? The only
thing that go up against a gorilla is another gorilla. We need to get a
big player or players on side. That gets into Big-Company Politics and
where we are all out of our depth. If the other players support SPF,
they will do so for reasons of their own. The big-company decision
makers aren't on this list arguing their case because (1) we're not even
on their radar, and (2) even if we were, they'd have minders and NDAs
and so on, and this is too public a forum.
But the avalanche has not started.
There is still time for the pebbles to vote.
The gorillas could still be influenced by the grassroots.
For a start it would help if one of the players could endorse a candidate.
People who are interested in the dynamics of all this should read
Geoffrey Moore.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060517123/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0887308244/
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