Why are Standardization Train Wrecks always in Slow Motion?

Back in 2003, it was already all to obvious that WS-* standardization would ultimately lead to a train wreck. That's 3 years ago since I wrote the piece "Standards: Doomed to Repeat Itself?".

The blogsphere is again abuzz recaping the failures of CORBA and transposing that to the imminent failure of WS-*. Truth is, although we collectively see the train wreck coming, we don't collectively witness the failure as a single unequivocal event. We don't all see the WS-Death Star bursting in the dead of space in an instant. So, there's no one event to talk about, rather there's a steady stream of conversation that stretches endlessly into time. It's just like my "SOAP is Comatose" piece, where one can't declare something dead.

We will continue to hear counter arguments that every is happening by plan and that the standards are in the right course. When one makes such a big intellectual investment, its only natural to continue to spend intellectual capital maintaining a white elephant. Many standards are the money pit equivalent of intellectual pursuits. But when the day of reckoning truly arrives, then the original stakeholders and proponents over time would spin failure as success.

What truly seems sad is that progression of standard architecture proposals are becoming more intellectually bankrupt over time. That is, the newer the standard the more the marketecture than the technical architecure. Let's see, we had OSF/DCE, followed by OMG/CORBA, then by JCP/EJB, then came WS-I/WS-*. When CORBA came out, not many people could pinpoint its faults, however EJB was apparent to many and WS-* was certainly a joke for most. So here's a new observation "Technical standards regress in proportion to technological progress".

I hope I can have a more detailed study the phenomena in a subsequent post.