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There are two kinds of protocol wars: one is between competing protocols, and the other is between protocol implementations. I would like to offer a glimpse into the reasons and ways in which companies implementing the same protocol compete with each other. However, I will first need to make a small disclaimer: any example I give here is not meant to imply that any company involved has any intention of malice or foul play. In fact, I am sure that all companies involved acted to the betterment of the protocol and of humanity in general, to the best of their ability.

Can’t we live in peace?

There are many reasons to live in peace, but since companies are measured by economic, not spiritual success, there is a huge reason to compete on market share. The gains in diverting from the common protocol are:

• Brand differentiation - if we are all implementing the same protocol, how can a company make its product stand out? They have to use proprietary features that nobody else has.
• Protecting the turf - interoperability also means that you are easily replaced. A customer bought your products, but he can just as easily buy the competitors’ the next time he expands.
• Leading the market - if you have a large enough market share, all the other players will have to follow what you do rather than what the standard says.

The reasons to follow the common protocol are:

• Strategic partnership - many interoperable small companies can rival large, non-interoperable ones.
• Gaining ground - your products can be integrated within a competitor’s network.
• Certification - some customers only want to buy from companies who will not “lock them in.”

It would seem like the bigger the company, the less likely it is to play by the rules. Take, for example, a well-known company that starts with ‘M’ and ends with ‘icrosoft’. Their old H.323 product, NetMeeting, would close the call upon receiving some capability fields it does not like. It has not been maintained for years, but we are still asked about it, since the product is somewhat like a de-facto standard.

The art of war

The most common way of waging protocol wars is through the standard itself. And there are some pretty effective options here:

Patent it or make it complex

For instance, add a procedure to the standard, but also register a patent on it. That way you are both covered by the standard and are the only one who can implement this feature. Standardization bodies are aware of this trick, and try to refrain from adding patent-protected features, but adding features that are very hard to implement (of course, your company already implemented them), and making them recommended works just the same.

Standards prevention

A company may want to prevent a feature from being added to the standard in order to protect a proprietary solution or a more complicated implementation already in place. Such was the case for the Presence feature in H.323. In this case, the relevant companies wanted to protect a unique feature of their SIP implementation. Any suggested way to add presence to H.323 (including “use SIP for presence”) was rejected, and H.323 never had a standardized Presence feature.

Know thy bureaucracy

For standard wars, one must always be familiar with the procedures of the standard body in question, or the proposal is doomed to fail. Such was the case with the proposal for firewall/NAT traversal. A consortium of Chinese companies tried to add a standard method for firewall/NAT traversal, and while such a method was needed, their submitted documents did not provide details as to their proposed solution. Of course, they were rejected time after time, and asked to provide such details to no avail. Finally, another consortium of companies submitted detailed documents as to the methods of traversal, which were added into the standard. Still, the Chinese consortium claims there are problems with the methods, yet still does not provide details.

Cooperate

Finally, it never hurts to make deals with other members of the standardization body. Sometimes you can pass a problematic proposal by offering help in passing another problematic proposal.

The argument for peace

I have intentionally left aside the biggest argument for following the common protocol: the outside threat. Where there are several protocols competing for the same niche, wars inside a protocol weaken it, and common work towards improvement of the protocol strengthens it. The Arabs say:

“Me against my brother;
my brother and me against our cousins;
our cousins, my brother and me against the world.”