MONDAY NOVEMBER 30 1998 ience & Technology
STANDARDS: Driving down the
fast track
Technological change has outpaced the standards authorities. They now plan to catch up, writes Andrew Baxter
GraphOne of the costliest, most hard-fought
battles between incompatible product formats ended more than a
decade ago with victory in the marketplace for the VHS video
recorder system over its Betamax rival.
Millions of consumers were left angry and confused, while several
electronics companies licked their wounds.
For years such battles have been a
fact of life in consumer electronics and information technology,
as more recent squabbles over Digital Versatile Disc (DVD)
formats have shown. It may never be possible to eliminate them,
but now these industries and the standards organisations which
work with them are having a go.
Format battles occur partly because technological change and
product development have far outpaced the creation of
widely-agreed global product standards.
Over the past year, the world's big standards organisations have
responded with "fast-track" or informal ways to help
industry agree product specifications. One aim is to agree basic
specifications before product launches to avoid battles in the
marketplace.
Reaching a global consensus on a
product standard can take five to seven years because of the
range of interests - industries, consumers, governments and
others - and the plethora of national and international
committees involved. This may not matter in some industries where
the pace of technology change is slower but in consumer
electronics and IT the delay presents manufacturers with a
problem.
"International standardisation is losing ground, compared to
proprietary solutions, because people simply cannot wait,"
says Leonardo Chiariglione, head of television technologies
research at CSELT, Telecom Italia's corporate research centre.
The committee system, he says, is not equipped to respond to the
sector's needs: "You establish an organisation with
committees and sub-committees, then a new technology comes up and
you don't have the right people working on them."
Standards organisations agree that
something needs to be done if they are to remain relevant to
large sections of the electronics industry. "The penny has
dropped over the last year," says David Lazenby, director of
standards at the British Standards Institution. "The IT and
electronics industries were getting more and more restive."
Tony Raeburn, general secretary of the Geneva-based International
Electrotechnical Commission, which develops and publishes
electrical and electronics standards, says: "When you have
products that last two to three years from launch to replacement,
then clearly our conventional standards process is far too
slow."
Most standard-setting organisations offer processes which require
lower levels of consensus and transparency than is required for a
fully- fledged standard. The IEC,
says Mr Raeburn, had been considering adapting these for the
electronics sector, but decided it was pointless. "Big
companies such as Sony, Alcatel and Rockwell said we needed
something different. Rather than waiting for a full international
consensus that may never be achieved, they wanted a specification
they and their customers could use."
At the end of last year, the IEC launched its Industry Technical Agreements, a
high-speed process aimed at delivering industry specifications in
months. Similar products have been launched by organisations
including the International Standards Organisation (Iso), which
is the IEC's sister organisation, Cen, the European
standards-making body, and the BSI.
These organisations lend their facilities and expertise to help
industry hammer out the specifications. In the case of ITAs,
industry players agree among themselves who is to take part, but
the results carry an intrinsic "seal of approval" from
the IEC, which will retain publishing rights and
share revenues with the participants.
Last month, the IEC announced
that its first ITA was under way. The process is being used by
the Open Platform Initiative for Multimedia Access (Opima), a
consortium of more than 40 companies and organisations which was
started by Mr Chiariglione.
This aims to have defined by next September specifications that
would allow a consumer to access a range of multimedia services -
such as TVs, decoders, radios and personal computers - from one
terminal. Mr Chiariglione says multiple terminals with different
interfaces are expensive and confusing, and are slowing down the
adoption of digital services. He hopes products will be available
in 2000.
Mr Raeburn stresses that even in
electronics, the IEC's full
standardisation process is still needed in areas such as power
generation and transmission equipment. In consumer electronics,
he hopes ITAs will help prevent marketplace battles over formats
and give consumers confidence that changes in specifications will
not render their purchases unusable.
The new process has other advantages, he says.
"Multinationals such as Philips and Sony have their own
networks for talking to each other, but this gives an opportunity
for smaller companies to get involved."
The new ITA process, Mr Raeburn admits, is cutting corners.
"All the feedback we get is that the full international
consensus standard is not required, because things are happening
so quickly." In any case, he adds, an ITA could be turned
into a full standard later if required.
But if industry is happy, what about other interests? Couldn't
these fast-track processes produce an industry stitch-up that
leaves consumer organisations and governments under-represented.
"There is always going to be a trade-off between openness
and transparency on the one hand, and time," says Mr
Lazenby. "For industrial purposes, a fast-track approach is
fine, but I don't think it is appropriate when there is a public
or society issue involved." And the IEC points out that part of its role will be to ensure
the new fast-track agreements do not circumvent the full
standards process if that is more appropriate.
