In his blog, Tom Landspurg writes about the The Benefits of Fragmentation, and how
Innovation and Fragmentation are related to each other…
I agree with Tom. At the same time, I disagree with fragmentation just for the hell of it. For example, long a time ago I wrote a piece on my blog titled True WORA will never happen where I touched on this point of innovation — that innovation will always continue, and is necessary, and it is first realized as proprietary
extensions. Then I wrote another piece on my weblog titled Comments on Nokia SOA where I criticized Nokia for introducing fragmentation in the Java ME Web Services area — in that particular case there was no need to do so. Since then, Nokia has corrected that situation, and their latest handsets support the JSR-172 standards, as it should be, vs. their proprietary APIs.
Bottom line is that companies, especially the ones with a lot of weight in this space, must be responsible about when to fragment and when not to. Proprietary technology is the natural evolution of technology. If fragmenting, companies must follow up with standardization.
Enrique