Describing Dare as an engineer was a mark of respect. I’ll stick with it regardless of his current title.

As to fifteen years ago, you don’t have to go back that far to remember the Web Services Initiative, a blatantly political “standards” land grab with IBM that sought unsuccessfully to squeeze Sun out.

I agree that both Apple and Google have employed effective open source strategies and that these are certainly not philanthropic gestures. But Microsoft may very well have figured out how to play this game with Live Mesh. Dare does not do Microsoft a service by tilting even a little jealously at windmills while decrying just the kind of ad hoc standards strategies he so ably supported in earlier less politicized days.

Dare isn’t antipathetic towards Google. Rather, he understands they’re the new Microsoft. The fact that Google gets away with stuff that used to get Microsoft in trouble must rankle him immensely. So he calls bullshit on it. And maybe is a little jealous.

If, fifteen years ago, Microsoft had created an “open standards” group for mail and network protocols, can you imagine the uproar that would have ensued? They’re already vilified every time they work with an existing standards body.

Meanwhile, Google and Apple have very successfully co-opted the Open Source movement to achieve their equivalent competitive agendas. You’re kidding yourself if you believe Apple does things like Bonjour and FireWire, or Google does things like OpenSocial and OAuth as some kind of philanthropic gestures. Microsoft has just never figured out how to do this. They can’t even get the naming right — ActiveSync instead of OpenSync, OLE instead of OpenDoc, etc.

Dare’s right to call bullshit on Google’s new OWF “standards” group. Kevin claims the OWF isn’t reinventing the IETF… but then says it’s about all the same things the IETF is about. With a smaller echo chamber and more control for Google, I guess. Specs as weak as these might have a rough time in a real standards group.

Sounds like *you* are the one being the jackass here. Dare’s response sounded reasonable while you come off as “go away”! FAIL.

Dare’s response suggests you might be right about some of the motivation, but I disagree with you about Mesh and wonder whether Dare touches that group or not.

Typical that you would hide behind the engineer mantle. Perhaps you don’t understand that your bias distorts your acknowledged brilliance and formative role in the technologies you have championed at great risk to yourself and the admiration of those who you say didn’t read every word you wrote or don’t have the technical background to understand your points. Kevin Marks above seems to have the prerequisite attributes. Go slime him.

It must have been a busy week, I’d almost forgotten about OWF hubbub from over the weekend.

Anyway, I often wonder why people bother to subscribe to my blog if they aren’t going to take the time to read what I wrote or lack the technical background to understand what I’m talking about.

The IETF was where Atom (RFC 4287) and the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023) were standardized. I’m sorry if my post was written in a way that made it hard to understand that point.

He’s probably changed over time from his quote in 2004 from a brilliant engineer with an independent attitude to someone that wants to carve out an actual difference-making career at Redmond.

To project on to him (wow, is he going to hate this) I would think that his ‘What Google Has Done Wrong This Week’ repeated style is coming out of the fact that he is frustrated by (a) what his ‘side’ are lamely doing and (b) his lack of progression in getting things done inside Redmond.

It must be killing him that the Facebook/Google/GoodPressNew2.0 young crews are setting the agenda nowadays. Long gone are the days of any coherent Microsoft strategy for the web (sorry, don’t buy the Mesh vision yet, I’m an ex-Groove user) and the ‘MS Live’ stuff is the ‘Ford circa 1980s’ of the innovation curve – Popular until people get passionate and understand the other choices.

I wait for the old Dare to come back with an contribution rather than just seeing him set up his ‘I don’t speak for Microsoft, but here’ what’s wrong with Google’ repeated recordings.

I really don’t see the need for another layer. If what’s required is an Apache or Eclipse Foundation for specs, then that’s exactly what the IETF has been for the last couple of decades. RFCs are clear, open and (above all) easy to turn into implementations.

Complexity breeds confusion. If we want an open web, then we need to simplify things, not add extra layers of specifications that need to be untangled from the W3C, OASIS, the WHATWG, and the OWF before anyone writes a line of code.

If there’s a need for a OWF, it’s not as another specification body. What the web really needs is a test case body, one that can authoritatively define the test cases that any and all web applications and protocol implementations need to pass before they can be said to be open.

I used to be an architect. It was an awful lot easier to write the specs and argue over the fine details than it was to actually define the tests that would prove that my teams’ elegant designs would actually work. Instead of wasting more pixels and cycles on specifications, let’s test the web and make sure it’s really working.

Then we can really build an open web, one where everything just works together.

I understand how both of you feel, just don’t agree with you and do agree with Recordon et al who find the need for a further layer here. And since I feel that Obasanjo performed similar services in the layer around RSS, along with others including myself, that his anitpathy toward Google is irrelevant and clouds his otherwise excellent judgment.