FakeSteve and the Value of Consortia
My son pointed me to a post on the usually entertaining FakeSteve blog criticizing Google’s new Open Handset Alliance. The author quotes the WSJ article on the endevor, which says “Tech consortia for decades have been notorious for failing to live up to their promise.” It’s the “failure of consortia” that caught my eye.
Before I go off on a rant we should be clear that Mr. Fake and the WSJ are talking about product consotia, not standards consortia. It may be true that product consortia haven’t been terrible effective, but let’s not get that confused with standards consortia, upon which Apple’s (and any other vendor’s) life depends. Given a moment’s thought that should be clear, but I’m afraid that many people will see the word “consortia” and automatically assume that all types are included in the criticism, including many that are successful.
Successful products do tend to be developed by single companies. Laptop computers, automobiles, refrigerators, etc. are all developed and built by companies. Windows and MacOS were developed by companies. But then again Linux was developed by a cooperative effort (we could call it a loose consortia, I guess); time will tell which is most successful.
We shouldn’t forget, though, that any of those products are possible only because of the agreed-upon standards developed by various standards consortia. No, you don’t need a consortium to develop a single product (FakeSteve’s refrigerator example), but think of the number of standards that are used when building the fridge, from the 110v AC household current used to run the thing all the way up to the physical size of the box that fits into a standard cabinet opening.
And just how many standards do you think went into the iPhone? The mobile phone industry would be impossible without standards, most particularly for the standards such as GSM and GPRS used for transmission (and many more; see the Wikipedia article), all of which were developed by consortia. Any time you have two or more dissimilar products communicating with each other there’s going to be a standard required. And that’s only the cell phone part of the iPhone; think about the music player (MP3s, etc.) and other functions.
So let’s not paint all consortia with the same broad brush; some are successful and others not. I can’t speak much about product consortia, but I can say that standards consortia (and other standards organizations) are very successful.