Bloated, slow and self-perpetuating: Cisco slams standards groups

Scary.

Only had brief and unsatisfactory dealings with Cisco (sought a Windows wireless adapter driver that worked). Various bods from the organisation responded to emails, but none solved an apparently simple issue.

Website looked like it had been designed by Albert Speer -- doubtless redesigned to be less intimidating since.

Don't knock standardisation

Some of us make a living out of it :)

On a serious note, though, in an ideal world, good standards follow good practice. Cisco's frustration with the "Design in Committee" that takes place especially in communications standards is fair enough.

There also seems to be drive from some participants in standards to get their proprietary "widget" required, so that there's some licencing income from the standard when it is complete.

I read the first line of the title

"Bloated, slow and self-perpetuating: Cisco"

My first thought was: you hit the nail on the head there.

terse moments at IETF 91 as a result

Bwahahaha...

The Hawaii IETF... AKA The Holiday IETF. Most people who go to IETF to get work done declined to go there. I did - waste of time and money.

If that is used as a golden standard of SDO, well, I agree with Ward.

Otherwise, he is blasting the wrong thing - the fundamental problem of IETF is use of Human Shields from service providers by the Chinese vendors. You get a totally useless meaningless draft whose purpose is solely draft tourism and which sometimes is a search/n/replace of another draft (submitted to another WG). If it was just vendor X, that should have been fair game to be nuked until it glows. It is clear that it is there just to provide more work for Dumb, Dumber (any IETF attendee will recognize those two) and a couple of tourists to assist them.

So you arm the BFG, raise it to eye level to press the trigger and you notice 2 names from a major SP account in the draft. Human shields. Usually these are from the R&D (aka CTO) organizations so they have nothing to do with architecture and choosing vendor gear. It is unfortunately enough for the rules of engagement to kick in and everyone to hold their fire. At which point the draft tourists smile and proceed to try to make it presented, a WG document, etc. All of that takes time from real work so rather unsurprisingly the SDO proceeds at a snail pace.

That is IETF. I would not even comment on ITU, 3GPP Broadband Forum or IEE. There "vendor interest" is an official and sole means of driving a standard so no point to comment on it.

Anonymous (for reasons).

What goes around...

I seem to remember a time when cisco was saying exactly the same thing about ITU/CCITT standards while being remarkably keen on the IETF where, simply by showing up in sufficient strength, it was able to steamroller the WGs withquickly establish consensus on such abominations wonderfully-elegantly crafted standards as SIP.

I think the problem is that cisco is now bloated and slow and finding that self-perpetuating is going to be a struggle as the various SDOs now contain a greater preponderance of representatives whose jobs no longer depend on cisco.