Stop me if you've heard this one. Two MBAs are out hiking in the woods. One sits down and takes off his wingtips, replacing them with running shoes. The other, curious, asks why. In case we encounter a bear, replies the first. Don't be silly, says the other, you can't outrun a bear. To which the first utters a Great Truth: I don't have to be faster than the bear; I just have to be faster than you.

Ah, yes-the bear-in-the-woods theory of competition-all that matters is beating the other guy. Management theory tells us that the only legitimate reason for a business to exist is to serve a customer. In our little corner of the economy, we do this by innovating, building faster/better/cheaper, and getting all this great stuff into the hands of people whose lives are bettered in the process.

Now, the evidence
But, really, great leaps almost always require the context of a standard, which provides a basis for interoperability as well as lower costs, mainly due to larger investments in VLSI. Most important, though, it gives a warm, fuzzy feeling to the uninitiated, who will never understand the technology (and who otherwise might fear it), but who will ultimately buy great quantities of it suitably embodied in products.

Need evidence? Both 802.3 and 802.11 opened the floodgates for wired and wireless-the two most important networking technologies ever. The availability of standardized, low-cost products has changed the way many people work and enabled new applications that enhance life-and even save it-in countless ways.

It makes sense to get standards out as quickly as possible, so as to head down this path of benefiting the customer with all due speed. Now, while the standards process itself isn't designed for speed, it does need to be fair, open, deliberative and designed to provide broad support for the end result.

Now to the point-the 802.11n standard has been under development for quite some time, and it appeared until recently that we were very near a unified proposal with broad support. But word has reached me, through a number of channels, that there are those who want to roll things back a bit via yet another proposal. If this new proposal is really new, different and will provide a meaningful benefit to the customer, great. Bring it on. But if this is a bear-in-the-woods case, enough already. Let's get a standard out, even if we have to go back later to add something else (and we will, regardless).

Slowing progress in the development of standards has become, sadly, a legitimate form of competition. It's really quite remarkable that otherwise-warring parties can come together at all for the industry's good and produce some intellectual property that enables all those applications that enhance and save lives.

With respect to .11n, it's pretty clear that MIMO/OFDM is it. Have you tried any of the MIMO products on the market today? Prepare to be amazed. With the recent availability of 240-Mbit/second parts, well, just think of what we could do.

In my humble opinion, it's much more important to serve a customer than it is to make sure it's your competitor that the bear gets. I've generally found that bears don't pay much attention to those who really care about putting benefits into the hands of those who need them.

Craig Mathias, principal at Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.)