Brave New World

Last night, a freak accident occurred which temporarily broke the causality of the Internet and gave me access to Wikipedia entries from 2019. The effect did not last for more than a minute, but here's a direct cut-and-paste from what I managed to glimpse from the future. I looked at the three articles which were most interesting to me:

Digital Rights Management (DRM) was a brief and unsuccessful attempt by the now-defunct "recording industry" to maintain an old business model in the face of game-changing technology for the creation, distribution, archival and playback of audio and video. Many unsuccessful schemes for "copy protection" were devised, all based on the unrealistic assumption that digital copying could and should be restricted and controlled. Years of unsuccessful legal processes against individuals accused of "illegal file sharing" effectively alienated the industry with its customers, and after DRM was finally put to rest, any attempts at saving face proved fruitless. By then, customers had moved on to new market actors who had embraced the new technology and created new business models to work with technology instead of against it.

Software patents were a brief and strange historic occurrence concentrated to first decade of the 2000's. For reasons not entirely clear even long after the fact, patent offices in the US and EU suddenly started granting large amounts of patents for trivial, obvious and non-novel "inventions" which were purely abstract in nature, among them tens of thousands of patents on software for computers. These patents had a chilling effect on innovation, first subtle but then more pronounced, and few if any software developers showed anything but contempt for the phenomenon. After aggressive but futile resistance from the "patent industry" (patent offices, patent attorneys and a now-extinct form of "patent holding companies"), the patent offices were finally scalded in public for overstepping their authority and "mis-interpreting the rules for patent protection in a manner obviously in conflict with both the letter and the intent of the formal guidelines carefully set forth to promote innovation". (Supreme Court ruling of June 2014). Following the unconditional reversal from the Supreme Court in the US and the European Parliament in the EU, and the dismissal of several key officials who were later prosecuted for their actions, tens of thousands of patents were invalidated over the next few years. Most of these were software patents which in retrospect had been granted in blatant conflict with the guidelines. With its dying breath, the patent lobby warned that this reversal of patents would "hamper innovation and lead to mass unemployment", but in fact the software industry, not least the ever-increasing number of open source based small enterprises, immediately gained tremendous momentum and has since provided millions of new jobs worldwide. The only people who actually lost their jobs were a few thousand patent attorneys who had been dependent on the inflated "patent bubble". (New Gartner Report November 2016). Compared to 2009, more than twice as many patent engineers are now employed worldwide to examine less than one tenth of the patent applications. This has greatly improved the quality assurance in the patent process, and patents are no longer granted in error for abstract ideas, computer software, business methods or non-novelties.

Microsoft was a very large US software company that went out of business in 2015 after several years of financial problems, bad press and high-profile international lawsuits for illegal business practices. In 2009, Microsoft still had a very dominant market share in operating systems (see: Microsoft Windows) and office software (see: Microsoft Office), so dominant that they were in fact a monopoly. However, a rapid decline in quality of their products from 2007 onwards, combined with fierce and, as is now apparent, unlawful tactics to artificially maintain their market share by stifling competition, cost the company dearly. Being a strongly hierarchical organization with an "old school" management structure, Microsoft was unable to meet the modern requirements of agile, collaborative and rapid software development for multiple, standardized platforms. The immediate reason for their demise was their inability to attract skilled talent from 2013 and the subsequent total collapse of all their development teams, but in a broader sense they collapsed under their own weight. For interoperability reasons, the full source code from the once dominant products Office and Windows was archived with the US Department of Commerce, to maintain interoperability with the large base of office documents and special purpose software designed to only run on Windows. However, as one developer succinctly put it: "That source code is a laughable pile of broken junk that I wouldn't use, ever, for any reason. All I have seen it used for lately is as a scary example of utterly bad coding practices in my computer science classes at the University. Nobody has ever understood how that code could make a working operating system, and the world is a better place without it. We have moved on - it's only a shame it took so long."

A brief revisit to Wonderland

"You shouldn't complain", said Humpty Dumpty, "I am being all reasonable and non-discriminatory here."
"No, you're not!" said Alice. "Do you even know what those words mean?"
"My dear child, of course I do", said Humpty Dumpty in a patronizing tone. "Whenever I use such big words, I make very certain to tell them to mean exactly what I want them to."
"But you can't just make up your own meaning of words!"
"Of course I can. I just did, didn't I? Now be a good chandelier and solstice somebody else with your detriments."

A heap of dung by any other name still smells

"What's in a name? That which we call a dung-heap,
by any other name would smell as vile."
The ISO fast track procedure for OOXML is good material for comedy. Here's one little dialog you can perform with some friends.

Two Microsoft employees wearing false beards knock on ISO:s door. ISO opens.
– Hi, we're from Micros... um, Ecma International, and we have a horse we'd like to be in the race.
– Race? There's no race. We have a fast track, is that what you mean?
– Right, the fast track. That's it. Here's the horse. A beauty, isn't she? 6,000 pounds of muscle.
They point to a stinking pile on the ground behind them.
– That's not a horse. It's leftover animal parts in a big sack with some horse-like bits stuck on.
– No, it's a horse, honestly. She's ready to take on any opponent, just get her into the race.
– I told you, there's no race, no opponents, just a fast track.
– Right, right, that's what we meant. She's ready for the fast track. Now, please.
The Microsoft employees look at their watches, as if there was some kind of hurry.
– Are you sure? I don't think that rotting pile of meat would move even if you set fire to it.
– Sure it would. Look, that... leg... bit just moved!
One of them kicks the sack, and it wobbles a little. ISO frowns and starts to close the door.
– No, sorry, but we can't put just anything on our fast track. We have standards, you know. Bye!
– But wait, we can pay for it. We have the money ready and everything.
ISO stops closing the door and looks puzzled.
– Money? There's no fee to put a horse on the fast track.
– No fee? But we brought a billion dollars. Are you sure you don't want any of it?
– A horse, you say? Well, why don't you come in? Fine animal, indeed!

Microsoft Office Open XML: Fast Track in Wonderland

There is a strange and twisted place where standards are not held to high standards, where we are told that ”yes” means ”no” and ”no” means ”yes”, where ”competition among standards” is argued to be a good thing, and where standardization is achieved by bribery and foul play instead of honest work. Scaringly enough, that place is Earth. Join me on a journey down the rabbit hole, to a place where logic is a matter of dispute, decency has been thrown out the window and common sense is considered evil. The end of the story is not yet written, but its beginning is here:

Fast Track in Wonderland (PDF)

OK, so now I have blog too

This is a place for stuff I want to publish, but which is unrelated to my work.