Expertise and Innovation - was Re: [xml-dev] Non-Borg servers can authenticate Borg clients (Was Re: [xml-dev] Re: Cookies at XML Europe 2004 -- Call for Participation)

On Jan 9, 2004, at 11:08 PM, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
>>

>
> No.  Not at all, actually.  These things frequently are less 
> complicated
> than the grizzled veterans who've spent too long on their own paths
> complain.  The path he's proposing has less junk in the way than a lot
> of other approaches.

I'll guess that most useful innovations tend to come from visionaries 
who don't fully understand the complexities of what they're unleashing 
on the world, and not the experts who are focusing on the details.  
That's more or less Clayton Christensen in a nutshell -- the experts 
were doing the "sustaining innovations" to make faster and more 
complicated mainframes while the Jobs/Wozniaks of the world were 
screwing around in their parents' garages creating the "disruptive 
innovations."

I'm reminded of the (possibly apocryphal) story that Tim Berners-Lee 
was ignored or scorned by the hypertext community of the late 80's / 
early 90's because his stuff was so trivial and didn't address the 
interesting problems.  Of course, by ignoring the interesting problems 
he could deliver something that actually added value vastly 
disproportionate to the cost of seeing 404 messages now and then.

Security is another kettle of fish, of course, and to some extent we're 
paying the price for convenient simplifying assumptions 10 years ago.  
Still, it would be awfully nice if something as simple as HTTP digest 
authentication turned out to add value vastly disproportionate to the 
cost of (whatever its downside is).  I don't particularly believe that 
will happen, but I was very happy to see the discussion.  If nothing 
else, it looks like that has a lot more browser support than we 
thought, eh?