Bell's Axioms on Standards

Via Slashdot comes A Time and Place for Standards from ACM Queue by Gordon Bell

Some interesting observations in light of Sun's Jonathan Schwartz comments, in particular :

People buy products, not protocols or algorithms.

If their is no product their is no market, hence:

You get no product, technology, or standard before its time.

you actual have to solve the need not make the pain visible,which leads to:

Once a technology has been proven in a hardware implementation, it proceeds to be implemented in software running on high-performance processors.

many leading edge problems at first require dedicated hardware, but high volumes become only really high volume in software running on general processors, which leads to:

Ultimately, each high-volume information technology product becomes a commodity distributed free of charge or given away with something else.

but as soon as it is practical to run it as software it is unlikely stay proprietary and starts getting commodized, which leads back to

People buy products, not protocols or algorithms.

value add beyond the algorithm

Think of what this means not just the computer and software biz, but the music and movie biz, or others. (banking, telecom, advertising,...)