[whatwg] Chipset support is a good argument

[Jonas Sicking]

On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>>
>> It's not the standard alone that makes it happen. The standard is for
>> the general market neither a necessary nor a sufficient requirement for
>> uptake. However, for the individual vendor, a standard and the
>> perception that the market is adopting it will be a sufficient
>> requirement to make a decision to create a product. Lacking the
>> standard, just the perception that the market is adopting makes taking
>> that decision just that much harder.
>
> I don't buy it. Nobody bases their business decisions on what specs say,
> they base them on what their customers and potential customers say they
> are going to spend money on. (Or the equivalent in the relevant market.)

It's not the spec by itself that affects business decisions. It's the
people that back the spec that does. Having names like W3C, Mozilla,
Opera, Google, and the many other parties participating here
officially get behind a HTML spec that endorses Theora sends a signal
that this isn't just a buzz word, but something that is likely to
stick around. Especially in the context of what the future of the web
is going to look like.

Even better would be if we can get names like Apple and Microsoft to
endorse this too, but I don't think it stands and falls by having
these endorsements right now. Especially since so far I see no reason
that couldn't come later.

/ Jonas