Two new entries today in Tim Bray’s TPSM series. He’s started his actual analysis of and against the candidate predictors Management Approval and Standardization. Again, I mostly agree with his rankings and explanations, except for iTV.
The first predictor, Management Approval, shows nothing more clearly than that one of these things is not like the other
. Unlike twelve of the fourteen technologies he’s evaluating (the other exception being VRML) iTV doesn’t have much use, and hence little visibility, in a general corporate IT setting; management approval is about as applicable to iTV in business as it is to four-slice bagel toasters. In the cable industry, however, iTV doesn’t exactly sneak in to an MSO without a lot of involvement from higher-ups. As for being featured in Forbes more than once, Google begs to differ. iTV at least rates the same 7 as the WWW, albeit in a specific domain.
In his Standardization analysis of the iTV space Bray shows a little of what I complained about initially: his view of the tech seems to be limited to the early 1990s. Today’s iTV tech is, if not dominated, then at least highly influenced by standards, and is becoming more so every day. It’s been said that the nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from,
and iTV certainly proves that rule. It deserves at least the same 3 rating that UNIX/C receives for Posix work, which while useful has never been central to the story
; modern iTV is hardly a proprietary offering from a single vendor with poor developer relations
(although certain implementations remain so), and thus probably rates about a 5 for the similarity of current settop developments to the Browser Wars.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Bray’s next pseudo-random topic will be Investor support, and predict that the results will begin to coalesce. (It’s not that far, really… he almost states the latter in the last paragraph of Standardization.)
