Subject: Re: CCL:Anybody agrees with me?

From: Zsolt Zsoldos <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 08:22:10 -0500

Renxiao Wang wrote:

> Take the computer industry as an example. If they had not had such a
> standard at the very beginning (proposed by IBM, right?), maybe today we
> are using dozens of different style computers. That would be a chao! Take
> MicroSoft as another example. Although they make too much money, :-) they
> have done an excellent job to help "unifying" the interface of most
> current softwares. Therefore a software seems less confusing when we try
> to use it for the first time.

Oh, you have picked the perfect examples! ;-)

1. Hardware industry was monopolized by IBM. The industry was strangled,
prices fixed high until the DoJ trial broke the monopoly. THEN, the hardware
industry started a fast pace advancement, prices dropped tremendously and
the personal computers have flooded the market becoming available to everyone.

2. OS and desktop software industry is under Microsoft monopoly: they provide
the worst quality software on the face of Earth and force people to pay a ridiculous
price for it _every_ time one buys a new computer. They even made people believe,
that daily or more frequent reboot and system crashes are "normal" operational
procedures of a computer. They have never innovated anything but stole any good
ideas and forced out of business the innovator company by predatory marketing
(or simply bought the company on other occasions). IF the DoJ trial or Linux
will be able to crush this monopoly, THEN the software industry will make a
huge leap forward and you could witness lots of new innovations and better quality...

So, do you REALLY want to see the same monopoly control (what you phrased
'standard') in the molecular modelling software industry ????
Do you want a single large corporation to stifle innovation, keep the prices high
and the quality low in the name of a 'standard' ?

Zsolt Zsoldos

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From: Richard Gillilan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 14:00:01 -0500

> and the quality low in the name of a 'standard' ?

Does anyone know what share of the market is held by MSI now? I'll bet it's huge.

Richard Gillilan

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From: Huub van Dam <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 10 Feb 2000 19:10:02 +0000

> and the quality low in the name of a 'standard' ?

I believe we are suffering from some confusion about terms. I think unification can be
obtained by at least 2 ways:1) Domination. The IBM and Microsoft examples fall in this
category. By simply crushing all the alternatives only 1 approach remains accessable to
the ordinary people. The result is not necessarily the best one as Zsolt has pointed
out.
2) Standardisation. With standardisation I mean that a representative part of the
community active in the particular field meets to write a specification of how certain
things should be done. The resulting document should ideally be accessible to everyone
so that everyone can write software that meets the standard. Of course one may program
additional features that extend beyond the standard as long as they don't lead to
conflicts with the standard. Good examples are probably the standard C library, the SMTP
standard that defines the email protocol, and HTML. On the other hand Windoze is not a
standard operating system (even though most people use it), because there is no publicly
accessible specification agreed on by a representative part of all operating system
developers.

Of course there is no requirement to write software that conforms to a standard, but you
may miss the benefits of software components that are already available. Also, one
should not try to standardise everything. To avoid cripling innovation and the high
costs of frequent standard revisions one should only standardise those things for which
there is sufficient experience to forsee the implications of the choices that have to be
made.

The point remains that in chemistry there are (I believe) quite a few concepts where we
have a clear idea of what we are talking about. However, when it comes to representing
them in software it doesn't often happen that people get together to agree on an
acceptable way of how to do that. This may well be an undesirable situation. Take the
example of every day street traffic. In principle it doesn't really matter whether you
drive on the right or the left side of the road. Most countries though have chosen a
side for the simple reason that in modern traffic any of the choices is to be much
preferred over not making a choice at all. As chemistry related software becomes more of
an industry every day it may well be best to make a few choices.

Huub

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Huub van Dam                               E-mail: [email-masked]
CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory                  phone: +44-1925-603362
Daresbury, Warrington                         fax: +44-1925-603634
Cheshire, UK
WA4 4AD

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