Subject: Re: Standardization [was: Re: Newbie questions...] From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/05/11 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3135419859061714@naggum.no> * rpw3@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock) | Some have attributed this trend to a competitive/political principle | whimsically called by your truly "maximum mutual disadvantage". it started when some new suits at ISO wanted ISO to be more visible in the market and feared "competition" from fairly stupid companies that pushed their highly inferior "de facto" standards. there used to be directives that made it virtually impossible to have "invention by committee" in ISO -- but these were changed. this is another case where competition should only be engaged in by people motivated by a sense of their own strength, not fear of the perceived strength of random others, and should not be engaged in at all by people who believe in sports-style competition, where there is one winner and everybody else are necessarily losers until they can beat the winner. this is not one of those things the market can sort out, either, except that those who portray themselves as losers if they aren't the only winner will hopefully vanish completely when they are no longer winners. #:Erik