Subject: Re: Suggestion

From: "David Mitton" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 12:07:49 -0400

At 10/19/00 10:19 AM -0400, Keith Moore wrote:
> > The last thing I need is more political statements like that.
> > Stick to engineering here, please.
>
>the question is, what environment are we engineering for?  one
>which is controlled by Microsoft or one which is platform-agnostic?
>
>when I was on IESG the number of working group participants,
>even working group chairs, who would exchange working documents
>in MS Word or Powerpoint and thereby exclude folks not using
>Microsoft software, was truly appalling.
>
>the way I see it, IETF is about making the world a better place.
>engineering is the mechanism, but any activity that tries to
>improve the world is inherently a political one.
>
>Keith

Well, last I looked I didn't think that the IETF was "engineering" video 
conferencing application products here.  I would suspect that we are users 
of developed products, and that we should pick the products, perhaps 
several, that benefit the largest community that we wish to reach.

I know nothing about the suitability of the Netmeeting application (or even 
who makes it, presumably MS given your comment)

If what you are trying to do is be most inclusive in your tools, then stick 
to that goal.  It may mean working/translating in several environments and 
vendors.

What I do object to is backhanded Microsoft bashing.
Let me try the same tune with different lyrics:

"I don't like the size of Cisco in the networking market place. It's well 
established that cisco sales-droids are the minion of the devil, and all 
their engineers and representives sent to the IETF should be treated with 
equal caution.  And therefore we should toss any of their suggestions in 
the bin, because they are clearly bent on world domination. And certainly 
discourage adapting any protocols or products that they develop.  I think 
I'll look for an ISP that doesn't have any Cisco products in their network, 
and shun all others."

(gee that was fun!)  Useful not!

It's time to face facts.  There are many, many, many of us that use 
Microsoft officeware products.  It is extremely useful/easy for us to 
"talk" in our native language, but I agree wholeheartedly with the desire 
to not to marginalize anyone.  This is a social/user engineering problem. 
Denying MS tools are out there is not useful.  But that also works both 
ways.  I spend much more time than I feel appropriate, writing IETF format 
documents because the tools I have don't help me (that includes Unix based 
tools).

I don't think world progress is made by just bashing MS here.  I think we 
need to raise some of the officeware neophytes to a higher level of 
awareness, and someone (not me) needs to build some better document tools.

         Dave (nose back to the ID grindstone).

---------------------------------------------------------------
David Mitton                                  ESN: 248-4570
Advisor, Nortel Networks                      978-288-4570 Direct
ServiceWare, IP Mobility                      978-288-3030 FAX
Billerica, MA 01821                    [email-masked]

---

From: Keith Moore <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 13:51:41 -0400

> to that goal.  It may mean working/translating in several environments and

even that strategy is doomed to failure.  the only way to make the 
conferencing thing work is to settle on a small number of standards 
for interoperability, making sure that there are tools available for
every platform that support those standards.

my understanding is that netmeeting won't interoperate well with
anything else. 

> What I do object to is backhanded Microsoft bashing.

what I'm trying to do is to directly challenge the often-implicit
assumption that everybody uses Microsoft stuff.  (or that they should)
when someone says e.g. "let's just use NetMeeting" that is usually the 
assumption behind such a statement.

> (gee that was fun!)  Useful not!

I agree that the above is nearly content free.  but if someone had said
something of the form "cisco routers already support multicast via a
proprietary method which doesn't need support from the core, therefore
if we just use that method, we don't have to worry about whether 
ISPs will handle multicast" then I think it would have been entirely 
appropriate to point out, perhaps rather tersely, that the whole world
is not cisco and that we shouldn't bias our activities towards folks
who happen to use cisco routers.

> Microsoft officeware products.  

it never ceases to amaze me that when people complain about Microsoft,
cisco, or other 900 pound gorillas, others attribute this to a lack 
of knowlege on the complainer's part.  be assured that we are fully
aware that many people use Microsoft products.  if hardly anybody
used Microsoft's products then we wouldn't have nearly as great a
need to complain about them.

> It is extremely useful/easy for us to

or to put it another way, many of the tools you have are specifically 
designed to make it difficult to produce portable electronic documents.

in my experience, the RFC format is not only platform-agnostic,
it's about equally difficult to produce using traditional text-based
tools (emacs, nroff) and WYSIWYG editors (MS Word, WordPerfect).
In all cases you have to be picky about things like fonts, margin settings,
and page sizes. In all cases you have to post-process the output in order
to conform to the desired format.  The primary difference is that users
of WYSIWYG editors are accustomed to having their text "look good" while
they edit it, while users of text-based tools are accustomed to cleaning
up their text afterward.  I strongly believe that the latter kinds of
tools are superior in general for writing primarily-text documents of 
over a few pages in length, because they force the author to think 
about the words themselves and the overall structure of the document
rather than how the words look on a page.

on the other hand, I-D format is really easy to produce.  your lines
don't need to have even margins, and you don't even have to have 
page breaks.   just fire up emacs or notepad, put the boilerplate
at the top, and start typing.

> awareness, and someone (not me) needs to build some better document tools.

well, the specific point I was trying to make is that for a group that
is trying to develop cross-platform standards,  we already have far
too much bias toward Microsoft.  which isn't quite the same thing as
bashing them.

Keith

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2000 11:23:54 GMT

> Let me try the same tune with different lyrics:

The Cisco Kid was a friend of mine
He drink whiskey Pancho drink the wine
We met down on the border Rio Grande
Eat the salty peanuts out de can
The outlaws had us pinned down at the board
Cisco came and blasted?
Yah yah yah! -- WAR :-)

--
Aaron Durchgaloch -- Haifa High Tech Commerce R&D, Matam, IL-31905.