Longer or more meetings?

[Henning Schulzrinne]

There may well be two categories of work:

- incremental improvements on some protocol X ("maintenance mode")

- new service/protocol

At least in the applications area and, I'm guessing, routing and 
Internet, we've been mostly in maintenance mode in the past five years.

For the former, it is likely that companies that already have lots of 
experience building or operating X will have more expertise (and care 
more). For the latter, at least my experience has been that large 
companies are often slower to realize that they should care. Indeed, in 
some cases, there have been companies set up expressly to capitalize on 
these new services and protocols. Even when VCs threw around money by 
the bushel, these outfits were likely to be small. I think it would be 
an interesting exercise to take a look at some more recent successful 
new protocol developments and identify the key initial contributors.

In general, the danger of this discussion is that all of us have 
non-overlapping examples in our minds and are too polite (or afraid) to 
mention the disasters or successes we're thinking of.

I'm curious what people would consider the major (in terms of impact or 
additional network services) new IETF protocol efforts in the past five 
  or even ten years.

Eric Rescorla wrote:
> Margaret Wasserman <mrw@windriver.com> writes:
> 
>>I'm not sure that we have a shared concept of what "success" is...
>>Everyone keeps talking about "relevance".  Now, while it is obvious
>>that we don't want to work on things that are irrelevant, how are
>>we defining "relevance"?
>>
>>It seems, from observation, that we define "relevance" as
>>"commercial success".  And, it is obvious to me that a large
>>corporate gorilla has a lot more influence on corporate success
>>than a one-man consulting firm...
> 
> 
> I think you've missed my point. It's not necessarily the case that
> having large vendors have the most input into a protocol is the best
> way to make it a success. While the vendors may have the most
> to gain or lose, that doesn't mean that they have the most relevant 
> expertise. It seems to me that part of the IETF theory is that 
> protocol quality is key to deployment. In many cases, that quality
> is best injected by independent people with specific expertise.
> 
> -Ekr
>