Join us as we gather around the hedge,
where we dig into technology, business, and culture
with the finest minds in computer networking.
Now see, this is a back to back,
so I don't know who to say hi
to.
Whoever I don't know I don't know what
we should do. Like, I'm confused.
It's only back to back for you. It's
not back to back for the listener necessarily.
I guess that's true. Yeah. Unless they save
it up. Yeah. So if you're listening to
this, I'll do all the normal stuff. Hello,
Yvonne.
Well, hi, Russ. How are you today?
It's been a long time since we've talked.
Yeah. Yeah.
But, you know, actually,
I will say that seeing you at Oticon
was terrific.
Yes. Yeah. It was right. We we got
to see I'd never seen Tom in person.
Yeah. He's taller than I expected.
There's always this height thing. You never know.
He keeps and this always happens to me
when people keep their camera way up high.
And then so you get a sense of
their, you know, height, and then you meet
them in person and you're like and I
had several people that were like, oh, you're
shorter than I thought you would be. Yes.
I'm five foot two.
So, yes, I am I am short. But,
yeah, that was great to see you guys.
We had dinner, had some fun and interesting
conversation.
I wish I wish my wife would have
been able to come. She would have loved
to have met you, Yvonne, but she was
in Edmonton.
So there's
We met briefly once. Y'all came up for
a k y nug, and I did get
to meet you. Oh, that's right. That's correct.
Yeah. Yeah. So But it's been a bit.
Yeah. It's been a bit. It's been a
long time. And and Tom Tom, it was
a long way for him to get to
to OtterCon.
So long. It was an arduous, like, twenty
seven minutes from my house.
Spent more time looking for parking than I
did driving.
Oh my goodness. Not a surprise. No. It's
not. I I used to go into New
York City all the time, and I would
always take the train when I could, but
sometimes I had to drive. And whenever I
drove, I was like, I'm not looking for
parking. As soon as I get through the
Lincoln Tunnel, I'm gonna park at the at
the 32nd Street Garage because there's always parking
available in the 32nd seat garage. And people
are like, yeah. But you're going downtown. You
have to go, like, 40 blocks. I'm like,
I don't care.
Well, then you just hop on the subway.
Right? I mean, yeah. Or path or something.
Yeah. Like, I'm not driving into town to
try to find parking down down by Wall
Street. That's just not gonna happen. That's insane.
Alright. So sense?
Yeah.
So
today, we are talking about an article in
infrequently
noted,
which is interesting. It's a blog
by Alex Russell, and he only really talks
about browsers
and
standards and the process of progress. I have
my whole thing about progress progress and progressivism
that I could just talk for hours about.
I need to write a book on it,
but anyway.
And
the name of the blog post is Apple's
Assault on Standards.
And he's
primarily
talking
about
how Apple
has
used the power of the market to attack
interoperability.
And I'll just say, before we start talking
about this, that one of my most disliked
things in the world of IT right now
is calendaring.
Like,
if you don't have Google or Microsoft Calendar
or both of those, you are out of
luck when it comes to calendars,
which I think is utterly ridiculous. There ought
to be a standard
calendar
protocol. There is.
No one uses it.
Your only other option is something like Calendly,
which is another service that aggregates all those
things and pulls it together, but still requires
a certain degree of
human intervention to manage it. And, yes, it's
a scenario
in which
none of the vendors
saw enough value
in implementing a standard
that allows folks to use another system. That's
that's my that's my read on it anyway.
Yep. Right. They can make more money
by not having a standard than they could
by making
at least that that was their impression. That
was their understanding of the market correctly or
incorrectly. That was
the the their impression of the market.
So I think here he's talking about
he starts talking about
interoperability
and voluntary adoption of Internet Internet standards.
And he's talking about the IAB and the
IETF,
but this also applies to W3C, which is
one people very rarely think about. And W3C
does HTML.
So,
IETF does HTTPS,
HTTP,
and w three c does HTML and XML.
And for those of you who don't know
the answers,
know what those are, shame on you.
Aw. We don't shame people here, guys.
And
look, the standards conversation
is as old as technology
is has, as
long as technologies existed. Even
before there were technology standards, you've got, like,
bolts and wrenches and tools and and things
like that and standardization which has enabled people
to build more faster, more interoperably. Right? So
it's
not purely a technology conversation.
But the challenge is as technology
has become more of a business,
the implementation of standards
has become
fuzzier,
maybe Yeah. Or less consistent.
Yeah.
Companies have made decisions,
more from a business revenue standpoint versus interoperability
or from a purist,
what's gonna make the technology
operate the bit best standpoint. And so
that's why you end up with folks like
us
harping about interoperability and standards. Right? Yeah. So
it's interesting because I remember the first IETF
draft I wrote so many years ago
and oh, the first one I actually read,
and Yakov Rector, who's long gone by now,
I asked him I was talking to him
about writing this writing this spec, and he
said, essentially, what you want to do
is you want to write a specification
that only people who are sitting in the
room
when it was written or no people who
are sitting in the room when it was
written
can understand.
Because what you want like some security through
obscurity, Russ. Yeah. But no. But no.
Because the reasoning is is that
there are four or five vendors who participate
in the IETF. You don't want people who
don't participate
to be able to understand how to implement
it.
And that was that was the thinking
for a lot of people. And I think
that changed a lot
and became
through the middle years of the IETF and
became much more,
no. We need to do this where people
can implement it. And I think now the
problem is is we've gotten on the other
side of that and said, we can implement
it 40,000 ways, so let's just write all
40,000 up and create a camel.
And don't
don't bother. Like, we can call it interoperable
so long as everybody follows
standard a, b, or c, but a, b,
and c don't interoperate.
Right?
That's kind of what I think we are
where we are now. But but you've made
it functionally impossible
Yes.
Which
goes back to
why why are we here? Yeah. Exactly. Why
why do we do this? Why why do
we do this? Yes. Yeah.
So I just I I think that's that's
the natural progression of standards. So I don't
think he takes that into account in here.
But what is interesting to me about his
claims about, like, Apple
is that he says,
Apple has attempted to weasel out of being
a monopoly,
basically,
by saying that Safari
is one product in some situations and three
products in other situations.
And that iPadOS,
despite sharing nearly all code with iOS
and marketed under that brand for years, so
they're both called iOS.
But internally, they're managed as two separate products,
and they share
the vast majority of the code,
are actually
two
different
products
from a monopoly market perspective.
Like, he's talking about the contortions that Apple
has gone through
to
prevent their product from being, from iOS from
being considered a monopoly, or Safari from being
considered a monopoly.
So
I think that's
I think that's an interesting
perspective on it, and I think it actually
comes down to a lot of what we're
seeing,
not just with Apple, but with a lot
of other companies. Right? That this kind of
threatens interoperability and kind of threatens the distributed
nature
of the Internet itself.
The interlocking restrictions
that ensure that the web cannot disrupt native
apps within its user base,
and the ability to control developers such that
I don't know. I think I think it's
personally kind of crazy that I can't buy
things from certain vendors on my phone
because because the Play Store or whatever it
is, Apple Store or Play Store or whatever
whichever one it is, doesn't allow me to
do such a thing. Because
that vendor won't give money,
a percentage of their cut to the store.
I think that seems like
I don't know. Whatever.
Get over yourself. Well, we talked we talked
about this a little bit when we were
prepping for this episode, but,
you know, open standards are great for challengers,
for startups Mhmm. For new companies that want
to build something new and different.
And you will you can see over time
an organization's
take on
open standards, even sometimes open source on information
sharing
evolve
with their business.
In other words, as as comp companies gain
market share
and become a dominant player,
there is less incentive for them to implement
open standards
because in all likelihood,
users are gonna leave them, not come to
them because
of the amount of market share that they've
already captured.
And so I think, you know,
this is a pretty common trajectory. It's not
just Apple. I mean and I think,
like, for some of us, like, you can
tell when you entered in the industry as
to which vendor
you
you conceptualize
as being the person that does this. Like,
for me, it's Microsoft
because I was coming of age in the
industry in,
in the nineties and,
you know, really first became aware of this
phenomenon then with Microsoft and Exchange and SMTP
and email and how hard it was to
interoperate with their email servers and all that.
So for me,
like, it's Microsoft. It's not Apple who's the
primary offender. Yeah. But it's not because Apple
doesn't do it. It's just because that's when
my naivete
about the industry
was
assaulted
by this problem. And a lot of people
will point to, oh, Microsoft rescued Apple, which
they actually did, honestly.
But on the other side, like you're saying,
Yvonne, like, I remember walking into an egghead.
Okay. Let's not even go there.
I assume you know what an egghead is.
Tom, do you know what an egghead is?
Was
it a store? Yeah. It was a store.
Or am I? Yeah. Physical store. Oh. Yeah.
It was it was a physical store. And
I walked into an egghead, and there was
I don't know what version. I think it
was DOS six, Microsoft DOS six. And there
was a big,
pyramid
of Microsoft DOS six,
in the very front of the store. You
had to walk around the pyramid to get
into the store. Right?
And then
way in the back, in a little back
corner, there were half a dozen copies of
digital research DOS.
Yeah. Exactly. And I was like,
yeah. Let me see what's going on here.
I think I think maybe I understand this
one. And it really For sure. It annoyed
me. It really annoyed me. Like,
let them compete on equal ground
and let them do what they need to
do.
Right.
But there's, often their incentives,
outside of standards and interoperability and usefulness, you
know, I think that's kind of the point
of the
one of the points of the article that,
you know, these the bigger company gets, the
more it becomes a solid business decision for
them and a,
a sensible business decision to keep their users,
by force
and,
you know. Yeah. Well, you wanna build a
moat. That's what you wanna do. It's called
a moat. You wanna build a moat. Don't
let anybody into my castle of users.
So
And, you know, and
regardless of how purist we wanna be, we
all wanna have jobs
that where we get paychecks,
where you know? And and
that has to come from somewhere.
Right? And so organizations
need to drive revenue, and we all kinda
have to decide where we wanna be in
that in that process. But it's,
I don't know. It's it's it's hard to
find a,
even a neutral position in that conversation if
you're in tech. Right? You're you're gonna have
to, you know, accept certain,
you know, things that even may you know,
that that that maybe are
not perfect for you or that you would
love for it to be different.
But we all work in a world where,
you know, we have bills to pay. And
it's not just money, though. That's something I'll
say. It's not just about finances.
It's also about you're an engineer sitting at
a company,
whoever it is. Doesn't matter. Take your pick.
And you say,
alright.
This protocol
is really dumb.
The way this works, whatever it is, it's
dumb. It shouldn't work that way.
What I need to do is I need
to do this.
And so if you're big enough
when you say I needed to do this
and you develop it and you deploy it,
that becomes the de facto standard.
And it doesn't matter whether or not that
was your intent. Your intent was to do
a better thing
and then to make a better mousetrap. And
then the problem becomes your legal department steps
in and says, no. No. You can't open
source that.
That's that's where the real sometimes,
it's not exactly intentional that these moats get
built
in the perspective of finances.
Sometimes they're built because,
you know, some person's sitting in the back
corner and they're like, I can do it
better, and they write it. And it gets
deployed
across 10,000 machines or a million machines, and
then
that's the thing now.
So one thing I'll say is, like, I
fuss about Google on this score, and you
can just, like, you need to put your
ears and your fingers in your ears here,
Yvonne. Anyway
but they did they did at least
do the right thing with quick.
I mean, there were times when everybody was
wondering what was gonna happen with QUIC and
but they've they've done a very good job
with opening QUIC up. And Microsoft has done
a a fairly decent job more recently.
Tom might disagree with me here on Sonic,
building the community around Sonic.
When Sonic first hit the streets,
you couldn't download a copy of it that
would run. There was a GitHub repository, but
what does that even mean?
Like
Yeah. Yeah. No. I I don't disagree. I
think I think Microsoft put in the minimum
required effort and,
that's open source. That's, you know? Right. And
I think you ever You wanna you wanna
polish you wanna polish product, you buy it
from Apple. You don't get enough again.
Right. Exactly.
So yeah.
So I think Well and certain certain companies
have been able to work out a business
model where they can do some of both.
You know, there was,
you know, Red Hat tried to, you know,
worked to create this open source solution, but
then provide support value added components
for
companies that needed that enterprise level. Hey. I
need I need to pick up the phone.
I need to know that somebody's gonna be
there that's gonna be able to fix this.
You know, you think about the whole, Kubernetes
ecosystem and all that's that's that's happened there,
and that's because,
you know,
Google open sourced
that solution.
And and so there are examples
of that.
And and really,
in my mind, it's remarkable
that that approach has been
as effective as it's been.
And it's opened up a whole
world of economic development that we I mean,
it's it is hard to imagine the world
without Linux. Mhmm. Yeah. Right? I I mean,
I can't even conceptualize it. And you think
about all that Linux has enabled, whether it's,
you know,
well, you know, every I I like I
said, I just can't even I can't even
imagine what
our world would be like without it. Yeah.
Yeah. And that's an example of folks
it's where it's not exactly a standard, but
it is an open source solution
that,
folks have coalesced around in a bit. And
and then in the network world, you've got
things like NetBox
Yeah.
Which is DNS and bind. There's SMTP.
There are all these things that,
have really been a force multiplier.
And,
it is not an outcome I would have
imagined
if he would have asked me without having
seen it if it were possible. Yeah. And
sometimes that doesn't
lead to riches for the person who developed
it. DNS being a case in point. Like,
nobody got rich off of DNS
in the bind world.
Right? That nobody buy the the
ISC or I see I think it's ISC
got paid on a government contract to do
something, you know, to build this thing, and
they built it and released it open source.
And nobody at ISC has become a millionaire
based on DNS.
People at
VeriSign and Akamai who and CloudFlare have done
their own implementations. They've become much wealthier than
the people
off of those implementations than the people at
Bind ever did or at ISC ever did.
So that is that is a thing. The
other thing that always strikes me about this
thing this type of thing that Apple does
and other companies do it too, but Apple
is a premier example to me because the
Apple interface
is basically a Xerox Star. And for those
who haven't ever gone back that far and
worked on a Xerox Star, I used to
work on a Xerox Star, and we had,
you know, a thick net network with vampire
taps to to run the Xerox Star and
because they couldn't run it through the 21st
Air Force Building because it's a concrete block
and it's supposed to be bomb proof, they
ran it up the plenums.
And so you had these huge long cables
running up the air returns
up to all the floors with thick net
and all the thin net coming off vampires.
Anyway, that's the Xerox Star is that old,
and the Apple interface still looks
almost identical to me as a Xerox Star.
Whereas
as much as people complain about Windows
and how they change the interface all the
time, at least it's changing.
At least they're trying
to do something
different.
Sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed,
but they're trying to do something different to
me. Whereas Apple is like,
yep. That Xerox Star interface, that was the
most perfect thing that ever came along. We'll
make the corners a little more round, little
bit less round. We'll put shadows this week,
and we'll take the shadows off next week.
Things have changed in the last twenty years,
folks, with user interfaces.
Like, I don't know. It just seems
like that that so to me, part of
this whole game of
this monopolizing thing is it it does block
innovation
in some cases.
And this is why I think it was
so important that Google dropped Kubernetes in the
open source,
because it opened up a lot of innovation
that never would have happened
otherwise.
Right? And Linux.
I mean, how would we have ever gotten
to the Internet that we have today without
Linux?
That's just crazy.
So that's just another aspect that always occurs
to me
is the innovation bits as well.
So
anything else there, Yvonne?
No. I think we've covered it. Anything, Tom?
Nope. Sounds good to me. Tom Tom has
the standard plant.
Maybe he
has
the
standard
plant.
It's, got too many leaves now, so the
standard says I'm gonna have to cut some
of them off.
It really does look like it's growing a
sibling.
Alright.
Siamese plants. That's what that's that that's the
name of the plant. Siamese.
There we go.
Alright. So, Tom, say your word. Go ahead.
LinkedIn.
That's where I find him. And Yvonne.
Yeah.
You can find me on LinkedIn at Yvonne
Sharp or, check out the Cloud Gambit with
William Collins, the podcast where we talk about
all things
cloud and AI. And then,
over on Twitter, x at Sharp Network. Cool.
I'm Russ White. You can find me here
at rule eleven dot tech
at the hedge. I almost forgot. I'm like,
I'm my I'm getting so old. I forget
everything now.
It's the end of the year. This is
our last episode, Russ. It's you know, you're
gonna take a break and come back completely
fresh for the year. That's the idea, is
it?
That's what I'm telling myself.
Well, we know we live in an attention
driven economy, and we thank you very much
because of that for listening all the way
to the bitter end of this episode of
The Hedge, and we will catch you next
time.