With the soccer World Cup kicking off last week in South Africa, it is interesting to consider the effects that standardization has played in spreading the popularity of the game internationally.
Modern soccer stems from mid 19th century efforts to standardize the rules of various codes of football played throughout English public schools during the era.
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While face-to-face video calling on mobile phones has been available for around a decade now, the technology has never gain substantial widespread public adoption. However, the inclusion of “FaceTime” video calling in Apple’s upcoming iOS 4 for iPhone4, announced Monday by CEO Steve jobs at WWDC2010, may give the technology the prerequisite market penetration to reap positive network externalities.
With a brewing standards war heating up, eBooks are expected by many to revolutionize the publishing industry in much the same way that digital music revolutionized the music industry. China in particular has seen considerable growth in both eBook technology uptake and investment, and is expected to reach 30% of the global market the year.
Last month (April 12th), Hewlett-Packard Co (HP) announced the completion of its acquisition of 3Com for US$2.7billion. HP has also announced plans to build upon 3Com’s market lead in China to challenge rival Cisco’s market leadership worldwide in the market for enterprise networking solutions. The business plan’s focus is the increased use of open standards with the explicit purpose of lowering costs to consumers and stimulating increased innovation.
In reference to Cisco’s position in the market, albeit indirectly, Dave Donatelli (HP executive vice president and general manager of Enterprise Servers and Networking) commented following the merger:
“For years the IT industry has had to live with one viewpoint on networking—a closed and rigid model that is high in cost and slow to innovate. This has limited our IT clients’ ability to change and grow with the business. They’ve wanted a better choice in networking and HP is that better choice.”
Stressing the key role that open standards will play in HP’s enterprise networking business plan, Donatelli emphasised:
“With the addition of 3Com, HP will transform the networking industry by offering clients choice where there was none before—a choice of newer and more innovative networking technology based on open standards and offered at a competitive price point.”
After approval by the EU competition authority in February, the final hurdle for the acquisition which was announced in November last year was approval by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM), required due to 3com’s significant Chinese presence.
Following the merger, HP now holds the #1 position in the Chinese market for enterprise networking solutions with a 49% market share.
While Cisco represents an estimated 52% of the global market for enterprise networking solutions, the merger has strengthened HP’s #2 position with a market share of 20%. Time will tell whether the Chinese market can offer the leverage needed for HP to further gain ground against Cisco. The new situation is likely to stimulate both competition and innovation, which should benefit the networking industry both in the short and the long run.
Image by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
I have long been a fan of Dr Craig Venter, the American biologist and entrepreneur, most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome. Craig Venter’s biography sits on my desk as an inspiration. Craig Venter has been pursuing the dream of creating artificial life, and last week he succeeded in doing just that when his team created the first cell with a synthetic genome! To me, that’s a huge milestone and an achievement that needs to be commended (Which I have on my blog).
Predictably, there have been many calls for caution and that of Dr Venter playing God and there have been calls for standards.
Professor Julian Savulescu, from the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, said the potential of this science was “in the far future, but real and significant”.
“But the risks are also unparalleled,” he continued. “We need new standards of safety evaluation for this kind of radical research and protections from military or terrorist misuse and abuse.
“These could be used in the future to make the most powerful bioweapons imaginable. The challenge is to eat the fruit without the worm.”
While I understand the need for caution and standards especially in the military domain, the potential of this discovery to transform humanity is profound and we need to balance innovation and standards.
This may not be a view shared by many and I welcome thoughts and comments.
Last week, I was in Amsterdam as a speaker/analyst at the LTE world series in Amsterdam which is a top Telecoms conference especially for the Operator community. LTE is about ‘Beyond 3G’ networks and that’s an area with lots of standardization discussions (see here and here). At Amsterdam, there were two relevant themes for TalkStandards. I will cover one here (Voice standardization in 4G networks) and I will create a separate post for the other (IPR issues for 4G networks).
There is an informal joke in Telecoms circles which goes like this: When we created 3G we forgot about data, when we created 4G we forgot about voice!
Andy Updegrove recently posted an interesting article on ConsortiumInfo.org that discussed new legislation in the US which he hopes will close the growing divide with respect to “institutional understanding of the relationship between standards and trade” between on the one hand China and the EU, and on the other the US.
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Tomorrow (May 25th) the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT) kicks off in Amsterdam. This is the 17th edition of the biannual event which began in 1978 and will feature around 280 keynote speakers from business, government and academia.
Standards are supposed to be ‘boring’ and formalized but once in a while, we get some very colourful language. The Adobe – Apple debate has been getting a lot of coverage but last week, we reached new heights when Opera joined in the debate and said:
“At Opera we say that the future of the web is open web standards and Flash is not an open web standards technology.”
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Next week the 3GPP will host the LTE world summit in the Netherlands. The conference focuses on the 3GPP’s (3rd Generation Partnership Project) LTE (Long Term Evolution) standard for next generation mobile telecommunications networks. LTE is the main competitor to the WiMAX standard, both of which are branded as 4G mobile network standards, and is capable of speeds up to 100Mbit/s downloads and 50Mbits/s uploads wirelessly.
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