Bonnie Scott said...
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|The only way that AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve, and MSN will become
|educated about the Internet standards is if responsible people go to
I had to laugh at that last one. Is MSN really going to be open to
doing things someone else's way? And if so, why should I trust that
it's not just temporary, until they can subvert things to The Microsoft
Way? Sorry - I've been burned way too many times by MS to trust them.
But back to the main thread.
|work there. At Prodigy, especially, when we started to transition to
|open standards, there were perhaps five people who even knew what an RFC
|was--we were staffed by mainframe programmers. Compuserve was probably
|staffed by those with a BBS'ing background, and even young AOL started off
|as a proprietary sustem.
To an extent, I agree. But I think there's a larger problem here - the
one of technology vs culture. The technology is not yet to the level
where we can easily have smart agents deal with this stuff in a rational
fashion (despite predictions of my profs many moons ago) - at least not
for people who are ignorant of their network environment.
At the same time, at least in the USA, the ability to think and the
belief that you must comprehend before acting are in a decline. AOL
seems bent on handing technology to the masses when the tchnology
and the masses are not yet ready for each other.
Yes, this is a simplification, and there plenty of folks both at and
on AOL who do not fit this picture, but from the standpoint of someone
outside AOL dealing with the fallout, it's a good working definition
of the problem.
IMO.
|This whole industry is in a period of rapid transition. Some people need to
|go into the organizations that are causing the problems, present themselves as
|people who can help them, and get hired onto their technical staffs.
There are people doing that, at least at the lower levels, in
AOL. I don't know about higher up. But with AOL's growth rate,
they (those people I know about at, for instance, the SA level)
seem to be in massive fire-fighting mode. It's hard to change
the direction of things when you're busy keeping the boiler from
exploding.
Having said all that, I wish to add a hearty thanks to Bonnie for
her thoughtful insider's comments.
-Miles
Follow-Ups:
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