Gary,

Thanks so much for adding the GenCAM part of the story.  Here are a couple
of questions concerning the points you made:

> Today, with intelligent data such as ODB++ and IPC's GenCAM we are facing
the same issues.
> Yes, IPC has again provided a compliance test module to verify the
output/input of GenCAM data.
> Yes, some of the output software is being offered for free. Yes, companies
are offering tooling
> discounts for intelligent data files. And yes many companies are using
either of the two formats.
  Could you pass on information as to who is offering free output software?
Also, I would like to know about fabrication shops that offer discounts for
use of intelligent tooling.  When you say many companies are using either
format, are you talking about fabrication shops?
> Will either format take 100% market share? No! The fact remains that there
will be followers of
> both formats, followers of new formats, and then a large group that will
do nothing but sit around
> and wait for who knows what to happen.
  This is the real tragedy.  Right now, all fabrication shops accept Gerber,
as far as I know.  The more different intelligent formats we standardize,
the more expensive and complicated the software for the fab shops will
become since they will be forced to deal with multiple formats.  That will
eat up much or all of the possible savings the smart format was intended to
provide.  Consider that a CAM engineer at the fab shop will have to be
conversant in each format as well as be familiar with the bugs, tricks and
workarounds for each format on his/her importing software.  IMHO, one new
format would be a boon to the industry, while several new formats would be a
drain on resources.  In that case, we may be better off turning RS-274X into
a real standard and create a validation suite for it.  I can't believe I
just suggested that in public, but it's better than dealing with a Tower of
Babel due to multiple standards.

  Another issue that I've heard bandied about is the possible merging of
ODB++ and GenCAM.  Can't recall where I heard this, but it is an interesting
idea.  Is this rumor correct and if so, what is the status of that effort?

We can look at the personal computer industry and see examples of how single
and multiple standard solutions fared.  In the early 1980's, IBM released
the workings of the ISA bus.  Though their information was not totally
complete and there was no validation mechanism that I remember, it wasn't
too hard to fill in the blanks and it became the de facto standard for about
10 years.  Even after the initial period of heavy use, motherboard and
software vendors were compelled to provide backward compatibility for this
standard.  Toward the end of the useful life of the ISA bus, it became a
bottleneck for increased performance and there was a huge amount of pressure
to come up with an alternative.  A number of companies extended the ISA
architecture and released the EISA standard.  About the same time, the
industry formed the VESA consortium and came up with an architecture that
gave better access to the processor local bus.  Also around the same time,
IBM released the MicroChannel Architecture because, well, they were IBM.
Despite their technical superiority to ISA, none of these solutions lasted
more than a couple of years.

Enter the PCI special interest group who took the best of MicroChannel, VESA
and EISA and came up with an extensible bus architecture that served the
industry well up through the present.  By the time it is superceded, the PCI
bus will have been useful for about 10 years.  If you look at the period
when ISA, EISA, VESA and MicroChannel coexisted, progress in the industry
was stymied by the multiple standards.  Both hardware and software companies
were hamstrung and tried to hedge their bets by producing the same product
on multiple bus platforms.  In contrast, during both the stable ISA years
and the stable PCI years, technical advancements and total sales took off.
Everyone could work efficiently as there was a single hardware platform and
the market for every product was larger due to the single standard.  The
software situation was not as good because a single company controlled the
de facto standard.  This is not inherently bad, but due to their mindset and
the lack of broader industry control, they made frequent, undocumented
changes to their interfaces and tools that made software development a very
expensive endeavor.  Those with limited resources were slowed to a crawl or
eliminated.

There's a lot we can learn from this.

1) It is to our mutual advantage to select a single standard, even if it is
not optimal.  Having several similar competing solutions will slow down
industry progress.  IMHO, we will do better with a single mediocre standard
than several more advanced but competing approaches.

2) It is dangerous to have a single company in a position to control the
standard.  If their market share is great enough, they could, like
Microsoft, participate in industry standards efforts and sign off on the
results (i.e. HTML, Java), then go ahead and violate the standard so
competing products were not interoperable.  If the standards were not
controlled by a couple of players who had large competitive axes to grind,
this probably wouldn't have happened.  This is not meant as a criticism of
Valor and does not discourage ODB++ from becoming the new standard.  It does
have implications as to how the new standard should be managed.

Regards,

Seth Goodman
Goodman Associates, LLC
tel 608.833.9933
fax 608.833.9966