ISSUE: excessive perfectionism (was Re: ISSUE: Timeframes sho ld be focused on IETF purposes, not markets)

[Keith Moore]

> I'm not suggesting that we favour a sub-set; rather that we try to include
> all the *customers* ( stakeholders or users, if you prefer ) that we can
> identify - e.g. vendors, ISPs, researchers, end-users.....

I agree that if we're going to think in terms of "our job is to serve our
customers" we need to define it in this way.  And I think you're entirely
correct to point out that we need to define the term, because I suspect
there's been a substantial divergence in how people have been thinking about
it.  

I've often had the impression that the individuals pushing a particular
protocol considered the protocol's "customers" to be only those who would be
making commercial products using the protocol - or essentially, their
employers.  And given that the employers are the ones paying them for their
work on the protocol, it's easy to see how they'd get that view.

Getting back to the market timeliness concern, it might be that we should try
to separate concepts like "having the protocol finalized while there's still
a market opportunity for deployment" from "providing sufficient motivation to
potential implementors to work on the protocol specification" from "making
sure that the protocol does useful things while minimizing harm".  A concept
like "giving customers what they want" could encompass all of these if you
define "customer" broadly enough, but it masks the underlying conflicts.