Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
When it comes down to committees, you have to decide what Z is. Since different companies serve different markets, that is a complex task. Once that is done, the members have to decide upon Y. Since each company is serving a different Z they will each see market needs differently, thus have different perspectives on necessary feature sets, which makes deciding upon Y difficult.
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Worse, each company has to bear the cost (in code, development time and money, and product maintenance) of supporting everybody else's market ambitions. (If all you want to do is sell travel guides and cookbooks why should you have to bear the costs of supporting phone-home Javascript and textbbook-grade math support?)
When bugs are found in features that don't impact their customers, some players will be inclined to ignore the fixes so that over time there is drift in the implemented products and people who expect that any product supporting the spec will offer the same experience run into all sorts of "minor" inconsitencies and incompatibilities. Grumbling ensues. Everybody loses.
This has happened before (SGML, for one); it likely will happen again, even though you'd think the committee standards crowd would get the message.