The Shackled World of Computers

Anyone who's followed the world of computers honestly will have noticed a disease.  These great tools for data processing and communication are not all they could be.

We can't share our data as freely as we might want.  Major software developers deliberately make their products incompatible with competitors, and even earlier versions of their own product.  So if we want to share documents, we have to use the same software or suffer conversion losses.  If any part of a corporate network is based on certain servers, all the clients that interface must be the matching product from the same vendor.  We want to run something else with that server, we're out of luck.  We want to migrate to another vendors product, it has to be all at once with great disruption to our operations.

Minor software developers fall into the trap of using tools and libraries that lock their product to a certain operating system or runtime tool.  Should there then be desire to run the product on some other system, they find it easier to do a complete rewrite, which may not be a viable option.  Many web sites are written with tools that, perhaps unknown to the user, produce code incompatible with alternate browsers.  Some web developers write off users of alternate browsers as insignificant.

Help wanted ads frequently exhibit these shackles.  Instead of looking for experience with word processing, they ask for 'microsoft word'.  Companies looking for programmers to do a job no one in house has the skill for presume to know the exact technology and tool set for the job.  The customer should define the job, the expert doing the job should have latitude to determine the best way to do the job.  It all too often doesn't matter if you have stronger fundamental skills or know a better tool for the job.  If you don't bow down to the buzzword compliant tools asked for, you don't get the job.

The solution to much of this is respect for open standards, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard.  If software supported open standards, we could exchange files without having to buy from the same vendor.  We could mix clients and servers from different providers and have it work.  We could run the software we wanted on the operating system of our choice.

Peter Hanely
This rant licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/.