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156 Part 1 Introduction

The purpose of these principles is to insure interoperability, portability and reusability of
software components and independence from specific technologies, and to share the
burden of creating and managing a complex system among different business stake-
holders, such as consumers, service providers, and connectivity providers.
Although it has been established since the 1990s, it has had limited success in establishing
solutions which are branded as ‘TINA-compliant’.

How can companies influence or take control of Internet standards?
As well as the supra-governmental organizations which we have reviewed above, it can be argued
that companies seek control of the Internet to gain competitive advantage. For example,
Microsoft used what have been judged as anti-competitive tactics to gain a large market share for
its browser, Internet Explorer. In a five-year period, it achieved over 75% market share, which has
given it advantages in other areas of e-commerce such as advertising revenue through its portal
MSN (www.msn.com) and retail, through its sites such as travel site Expedia
(www.expedia.com). Microsoft has also sought to control standards such as HTML and has
introduced rival standards or variants of other standards (for example, VBScript rather than
JavaScript and C# rather than Java). The control exerted by Microsoft is criticized by many and
has been found to be anti-competitive in law (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/
700084.stm for a summary of the judgment).
The existence of global Internet standards bodies such as those described above arguably
means that it is less likely that one company can develop proprietary standards, although
Microsoft has been successfully using this approach for many years. Today, companies such
as Microsoft have to lobby independent organizations such as the World Wide Web Consor-
tium to have their input into standards such as XML. Businesses can protect their interests
in the Internet by lobbying these organizations or governments, or subscribing as members
and having employees involved with development of standards. Even SMEs can be involved.
Exchequer software, referred to in the XML section above, which has 75 employees, has been
able to obtain competitive advantage through being closely involved with the development
of XML standards for accounting software.
Many remain worried about the future control of the Internet by companies; the ‘World
of Ends’ campaign (www.worldofends.com) illustrates some of the problems where control
can limit consumer choice and stifle innovation. But the future of the Internet is assured
because the three core principles espoused in the World of Ends document remain true:
No one owns it.

Everyone can use it.
Anyone can improve it.

Open-source software

Open-source The selection of open-source software to support e-business applications is a significant
software decision for anyone managing technology infrastructure for a company. Open-source soft-
Is developed
collaboratively, ware is now significant in many categories relevant to e-business including operating
independent of a vendor, systems, browsers, web servers, office applications and content management systems
by a community of (including blogs).
software developers and
users. The Open Source organization (www.opensource.org) explains its benefits as follows:
The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redis-
tribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People
improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is
used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.
We in the open source community have learned that this rapid evolutionary process
produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few program-
mers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.