Subject: RE: [newtrk] Re: updated draft on cruft / draft-alvestrand-newtrk -cruft-00.txt

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 08:19:43 -0700

> I've been a director-level product marketing and/or product line 
> manager for networking products at a few companies (shh, don't tell 
> anyone :-)), and I can honestly say that it _never_ occurred to me to 
> look through the RFC index to determine what should be implemented in 
> my products.  I asked customers what they needed, I did competitive 
> evaluations, and I determined how newish standards-body work (IETF 
> and IEEE mostly) might apply to known customer problems.  I didn't 
> care enough about the classification of the I-Ds and RFCs I was 
> requiring in my Market Requirements Documents (MRDs) to even bother 
> to look them up.

The way I worked on promoting SAML was to talk to the folk at some
of the big 4 consulting firms and explained to them why they should
write a question about SAML support into the RFPs they wrote for 
their clients.

> I wasn't daunted by the fact that some of these 
> specs were still I-Ds, nor would I have noticed if some of them had 
> been informational or experimental rather than PS.

The only constituency I have ever met that cared about standard vs
experimental is ICANN. 

This makes the assumption that the standards process should be
driven by developers who implement and whose products are deployed.

I think that there is a fundamental mismatch here between the
idea that IETF standards are describing the reality of Internet
standards and the idea that the IETF is somehow equiped to provide
leadership. The two ideas are incompatible, if you do the first
your specifications must trail deployment, to do the second they
must lead and will inevitably result in mismatches.

All the developers seem to care about is whether the document is
stable enough to allow implementation.

.
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