Last modified: August 6, 1999 5:00 AM PDT
Why open standards are a myth
Talk of an "open standard"--an industry blueprint meant to ensure that competing products work together--imbues the debate over the messaging technology at the heart of a standoff between America Online and Microsoft. And because this particular communications software has hit the mainstream, the relatively obscure phrase has become familiar to even the newest of Internet newbies.
But what they are hearing is a
rallying cry that has lost much of its meaning within the high-tech industry in recent years. While open
standards still play an important role in disciplining Internet software
development, public discussion of standards has largely evolved--or degenerated--into a corporate tool, where a firm can maneuver itself on either side of an issue depending on its position in a particular market.
It boils down to this: If your company is a leader in its field, an open standard is not in your best interest because it could allow others to get a piece of the business. If your company is not a leader, this is exactly why you want to level the field.
Witness the battle over Java. Sun Microsystems wishes to retain the dual-mantle of Java inventor and Java standard bearer. Microsoft, and other companies hoping to gain Java market share, favor a third-party organization to maintain the standard.
But in this war of words, who's listening?
"There's no question that it's a little ridiculous that all companies--not just Microsoft--fly the flag of open standards when it suits them and clearly pursue their own advantage when it doesn't," said Lucas Graves, analyst with Jupiter Communications. "It's ridiculous because the consumer doesn't care. Let's not pretend that when we worship at the altar of open standards millions of average consumers are lined up behind us."
In the more cooperative days of the Internet, it was hoped that the World Wide Web Consortium and other industry standards bodies would ensure equal rights in the development of technology behind the medium, free of government control.
In today's Wintel-dominated computing world, however, many believe that such equality is impossible to achieve. That would require leaders like Microsoft to resist using their formidable resources and alliances over smaller competitors.
Last week, Microsoft publicly pressured AOL to adopt an open messaging standard after the leading online service blocked Microsoft's new messaging software from communicating with its own offering. AOL said that Microsoft's unilateral move compromised its members' privacy and security, unfairly hijacked its network resources, and automatically appropriated unwitting AOL subscribers.
Both companies say they support a move within the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to create a messaging standard that would require software to conform with publicly available specifications. That project, the Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol (IMPP), is said to be about six months away from its first draft.
Talking to each other
In the meantime, the two companies are left to skirmish over the more limited question of interoperability, or allowing one brand
of instant messenger to work with another. But according to AOL, even establishing interoperability between independent instant messaging systems will require a lot of technological woodshedding.
The online service hasn't even joined its own two messaging clients, the ICQ program with 38 million users, and AOL Instant Messenger, which boasts 40 million registrations. AOL questioned the practicality of Microsoft's sudden call for open standards, citing its own difficulty in making ICQ and AIM interoperable.
The industry must figure out whether instant
messaging will work with multiple registration names systems, or "namespaces," or just those defined by AOL. In other words, if an MSN user chooses a name, or "handle," that an AOL user already claims, there has to be a way for the competing systems to determine who is who.
"Basic interoperability is very hard to do," said AOL Interactive Services president Barry Schuler in an interview with CNET News.com. "We've been working on how to do interoperability for the past year [since the ICQ acquisition]. There are very complex technological issues."
Schuler cited other instances in which AOL made deals to provide AIM for use with other companies' non-messaging products, including those of Netscape, IBM's Lotus division, and RealNetworks.
Interoperability is not the only challenge the IETF faces in standardizing instant messaging. Schuler pointed to flaws in the email protocol in defense of a deliberate approach to creating this new standard.
"When they standardized email, it was a big screw-up," Schuler said. "There was no provision for authentication or privacy. And now, as a result, we have spam [unsolicited commercial email]. As the instant messaging standard emerges, we do not want to make the same mistakes."
Keeping the lead
While there may be legitimate reasons to take instant messaging
standardization slowly, a long delay won't hurt AOL--it will hurt Microsoft. Like any market leader, AOL has a
substantial interest in putting off interoperability or standards-based
messaging as long as possible.
It's essentially AOL's market to lose. 
The longer AOL holds onto its vast lead, the stronger that lead gets as users encourage others to download
the software through the Web phenomenon known as "viral marketing."
Moreover, as the owner of Microsoft victim Netscape, AOL is unlikely to underestimate Microsoft's ability to enter a market late and catch up fast.
"Microsoft competes hard, and standards are another weapon for them," said Ramanathan Guha, chief technology officer of Web start-up Epinions.com and former principal engineer at Netscape. "Every time they find themselves coming from way behind, they strongly support standards. Once they're in the driver's seat, they start making changes to those standards."
Microsoft acknowledged that standards, in general, are useful to marketing and development efforts.
"If you look at it historically, an element of standards has always been used by underdogs in markets," said Mark Ryland, director of standards activities at Microsoft. "But that's only one of the many reasons people get involved in standards efforts. Interoperability is so important, and companies can't do it alone."
Four years ago, during the Web's infancy, Netscape implemented a number of features that did not hew to the HTML standard. Microsoft cried foul.
"If nothing else, it created a lot of bad PR for Netscape," Guha said. "It slowed down Netscape so that Microsoft was able to catch up. Now that Microsoft is in control, it does what it wants to do."
Tricky moves
Guha said there were irregularities with Microsoft's implementation of W3C recommendations, including Cascading Style Sheets (CSS),
the Document Object Model (DOM),
and Extensible Markup Language (XML),
and the Resource Description Framerwork (RDF), which Guha
created at Netscape.
Microsoft maintained that it was standard practice to build on standards in shipping products.
"When people build products they add features as a value-add," Ryland said. "You have to accept that as a given. The standard defines a baseline of interoperability and then you add features."
Microsoft also counters that it has been far ahead of Netscape in standards support generally, a claim that the Web Standards Project, a standards advocacy group, supports with some key qualifications.
"In the past when they've been behind Netscape they've been really the leader in standards support," said George Olsen, WSP project leader. "Netscape has promised full support of CSS, DOM, and XML. Whether Microsoft will support them fully is a question we've put to Microsoft repeatedly, and we haven't gotten an answer."
Open in theory
As for AOL, it too has done its share of dancing around the open standards question.
In an April brouhaha over instant messaging and open standards, Netscape posted to Mozilla.org, its independent open-source software development group, a proposal for a chat client that would handle messages from every major chat client, including AIM, ICQ, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
In a move widely credited to the instant messaging ambitions of its new owner AOL, Netscape pulled the open-source chat pages within days of posting it.
The IETF also faulted Microsoft for demanding openness from competitors while not providing it with its own technology.
"How can you advocate openness of protocols while hiding your own protocol?" asked Vijay Saraswat, who heads up the IMPP effort at the IETF. "The work of the IETF will progress significantly if the protocols of all the instant messaging applications are made public. It would be nice if these companies would go ahead and publish them."
Microsoft said it would not rule out making its system interoperable with others, though it conceded that it had not yet done so. "We could in theory provide interoperability," said Deanna Sanford, lead product manager for MSN. "Have we announced that we are going to do so? No."
Sanford said the topic could come up at a September meeting called by Prodigy Internet to help resolve messaging conflict.
Many involved in the instant messaging debate hope that an IETF standard will quell the current wrangling over interoperability. Others say that standards bodies, while they can enforce some technological discipline on the Internet, ultimately wind up becoming dominated by any firm with a lock on the market.
"Is the W3C a rubber stamp for Microsoft? Absolutely not," said W3C spokesperson Janet Daly. "Every member organization in the W3C has, as part of the benefits of membership, the opportunity to work with a variety of organizations to develop technologies that are extensible and explicitly not vendor-specific. Companies come and go, products come and go, and perceptions of dominance come and go. But the Internet is here to stay." 
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