Archive for the ‘Standards’ Category

Strategy: Competitive Standards Strategy

Thursday, April 27th, 2006

While competitors and customers believe in standards that are fair, impartial and open, a company’s competitive interests are often met by seeking unfair, proprietary and closely controlled advantage. Yet the open standards process is valuable to a company in broadening the potential market, building a positive market reputation and building a community of potential customers. The challenge is to participate in and drive standards in a fair, impartial and open manner while internally pursuing an aggressive competitive product, market and standards strategy. This article will discuss:

  • Value of the Standards Process;
  • Ethics and the Standards Process;
  • Challenges of the Standards Process;
  • Competitive Strategy and the Standards Process.

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Strategy: The Palladium Print System

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

In 1986, within a few weeks of joining Digital Equipment Corporation as an Enterprise Management Architect, I was tossed a “simple” assignment of resolving a distributed queuing problem between VMS, Ultrix and the new line of LPS networked laser print servers. Customers were complaining that print jobs were not being printed in exact time-stamp order, with suspicion that one operating system was being given precedence over the other operating system. Since there was a bit of contention between the VMS proponents and the Ultrix proponents, the problem needed to be corrected to avoid internecine fighting within the customer-base. The real problem was with the lack of a coherent distributed queuing strategy between multiple print servers (each of which pre-queued a small number of jobs at a time) and multiple client OS printer queues. As anyone with experience standing in line at the bank knows, it can be a crap shoot who gets to a teller first when there are multiple lines to multiple tellers.

Solving the problem required more than a simple fix to the LPS and OS queuing systems. The solution was a new model for distributed printing across the networked printer and software product lines. So, I joined Tom Hastings from the Printer Division and colleagues from across engineering, program management and marketing to define a common Print Systems Model for the corporation.

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