Phones that cannot communicate? As manufacturers of mobile phones race to make their products more compatible, David Brunnen questions the folly of under-investment in Standards development and the clash of cultures in a convergent and interoperable world.
 
It might seem unlikely that a latter-day Bob Dylan would be inspired to question the sanity of the IT industry but there are surely times when even the most blinkered businesses, or their customers, might pause awhile to wonder at the folly of inventing things that just about work on their own but fall well short of working with other very similar things.

For anyone coming from the telecoms sector the word ‘interoperability’ is curious.  Why should such a word be needed?  Why would the notion ever be remarked upon?  Would these people from the planet Processor have us call our customers ‘Remote Users’?   Are we not all ‘part of the main’?

Edging towards each other, with the increasing tendency towards inter-marriage, the two tribes are finding that the scope for misunderstanding runs deeper than the language barrier.  ‘Coming from a different place’ is polite cover for total incomprehension and incredulity bordering on a ‘You cannot be serious’ or ‘I don’t belieeeeve it’ intensity of disbelief.

Its not that we are short of translators, it is more fundamental than that – more ‘top down’ than ‘bottom up’ - for one of these tribes does not allow Adapters.  They insist on things working properly from inception.  By ‘working properly’ they do not mean that it works OK in some limited isolated cosy corner cut off from the rest of humanity.  Fixing the expectation shortfall with an Adapter is, for the top-downers, far worse than evidence of shoddy design. It is, to be blunt, an admission of guilt way beyond a lack of technical elegance, the very worst of communications crimes, a failure to apply joined-up thinking, a woeful inability to envisage the bigger picture.

Down at the other pole, of course, we can’t be having all these hang-ups, all this delay and obstruction of progress, all this philosophical contemplation that looks from here like an excuse to suppress innovation.  We need to crack on with new ideas and do stuff they never imagined would be possible.  They might think we’ve thrown a spanner in their well-oiled machine but that’s because they simply don’t understand that to be disruptive is Mother Nature’s way.  We didn’t get we are today by avoiding accidents.  The more mistakes we make the better for everyone –  it is what we call a natural ‘learning process’.

Risks?  What risks?  Our customers are part of our great endeavour – with us on this journey - privileged even to be allowed to invest in this adventure –  growing up with new ideas and endless opportunities.

And, strange as it might appear from above, they do seem, down there, to be able to recruit customers who apparently do not mind disappointment.  Long after a childhood toughened, say, by the challenge of Sinclair’s ZX81, they seem to have acquired the habit.  They’ve become dismissive of Service Level Guarantees, not phased by software bugs, processor lock-ups and system crashes.  These are but minor inconveniences it seems when set against the wonder of their works, when it works, if it works, one way or another.

And so it is with Standards.  Make something new and before you can say ‘jack rabbit’ umpteen others have tried to improve it, shift it a bit, add on a couple of knobs and plug it into some other idea.  And although thousands of those volunteer technology testers called ‘early adopters’ are buying it, the mass market millions are holding back waiting to see if Mrs. Joneses boy has got one yet – and whether he can explain what it’s supposed to do – and how it fits into the greater scheme of things.

And that, my friends is where the top-downers and the bottom-uppers have to try to understand each other.  Forget diplomatic incidents, civil unrest, military might, international tensions - the real wars are being fought in the international forums of Standards Organisations.  Big bets and huge budgets are mobilised to manage the outcome of standards definitions – and on these, great fortunes will be won or lost.  Some of these conflicts take years to resolve.  Sometimes the process takes so long that the warring parties give up and join forces in other battles because the mass market itself gave up waiting and made up their own minds.  And some, like the current machinations in IEEE802.20 (mobile broadband wireless access) are battles for the very survival of the idea against those who wish it had never been invented or that it should at least have the decency to wait around for a few more years to give them time to make money out of the previous effort.

And governments who previously have quietly imagined that all this working out of ideas is something that industry gets on with very well, are now just waking up to the realisation that economic futures are being made or broken by forces well beyond their control.

The snag with this disinclination to get involved is that, quite unfairly, they have to live with the dissatisfaction of citizens whose expectations have not been met.  The ‘hands off’ approach to Standards  management will be seen to have been a bit short-sighted – especially when the pain of bringing order out of chaos unhappily coincides with an election year.

Fixing the problem is always more expensive than making sure the problem never arises.  Economic interoperability – the business of enabling businesses (and countries) to work with each other – is the natural high ground for governments.

But meanwhile the natives are getting restless.  The non-interoperability of 150 different competing video codecs, each preventing, rather than enabling, communications between mobile phone products has led to a race to see who can invent the best universal adapter before next Christmas.  ‘Not a problem we expected’ said one disarmingly honest manufacturer.

Or, as Bob might have sung, ‘How many codecs must my phone translate before I can see the film?  The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind.’