[Rets-dev] On Adoption,the pace of RETS and KISS

[Paul Stusiak]

The thread Google Base Housing vs. RETS has spanned many different 
topics, making a single response very difficult. Instead, I will attempt 
to reply to some individual comments. Please be aware that the context 
has been narrowed and that may result in the loss of the overarching 
context. The intent is not to pick on specific people who participated 
in the thread, but to correct what I see as some misconceptions.

fwanicka wrote


<quote>
This is part of the problem. The people on the inside think everything 
is going just fine with RETS. Trust me, there are many entities that 
have not adopted RETS or been slow to adopt because of its complicated 
nature. 1.x is a mess IMO, and 2.0 has been dragging on for years. I 
attended the New Orleans meeting (as well as several others prior to 
that one), and at that point, the plan was to demo 2.0 at that year’s 
NAR event and have the 2.0 standard finalized 6 months after that. 
Obviously, that was wildly optimistic given the speed at which things 
get accomplished in the RETS community.

</quote>

Nope. That's not what I think and I should know what the people on the 
inside think :-) One of my efforts for this year is to identify what the 
root reasons are for the slowing adoption. Anything that you would like 
to share on your observations, especially if you are permitted to expand 
beyond generalizations - I know it isn't always possible to name names, 
would be greatly appreciated.

I disagree with your assessment that RETS2 has been dragging. I would 
point out that once the research was done, the RETS Service document was 
delivered in a voting form in 8 months with a lot of feedback from the 
community and was adopted in August 2006, less that a year from the date 
when there was valid critical comment from people in the community like 
Gregg Petch and Mark Lesswing on the lack of concrete documentation for 
the RETS2 work. I would also point out that immediately preceding this 
time period, the community lost an important person with the death of 
Bruce Toback, who, unfortunately, took some of the critical information 
with him.

There is certainly room for improvement on the communications front and 
on the pace front. However, there are some very real brakes on the speed 
of things, mainly because many in the community have real jobs and only 
look at the RETS work sporadically. There are also brakes on the real 
need to build consensus in the community. It is not a dictatorship, 
despite what some think :-)

<quote>
By the time one of your versions gets finalized, it is outdated with 
regard to other current industry standards. 1.x was certainly that way, 
and 2.0 is heading in the same direction IMO. I don’t know what the 
solution is, but certainly admitting there is a problem would be a good 
first step. A good second step would be to look at what similar 
technologies/standards people are flocking to and adopting en masse, and 
try to learn from them. Googlebase is obviously not a complete 
replacement for RETS, but maybe something could be learned from it. The 
KISS principle seems to be lacking in the RETS community.

</quote>


I strongly disagree with this. We are getting uncomfortably close to the 
cutting edge in some things. We are current with the underlying w3c 
standards. Which industry standards are you talking about? While I would 
really like the standardization process to move faster, I don't see the 
RETS community being very far off the current standardization process 
pace of other efforts and faster than some. Please give the specifics if 
possible to help me understand.

I would suggest that we are looking at very different problem spaces 
from your comment about a good second step. The technologies of RETS2 
are being adopted widely in industry. The technologies that you are 
implying are also being adopted widely in industry. They are looking at 
things from a different perspective. Googlebase isn't even close to a 
replacement to RETS. It is solving a much narrower problem with a much 
smaller footprint. It is not and I repeat not a standard, in exactly the 
same way that MFC is not a standard from Microsoft. This is a vendor 
provided API from a very large vendor. Can we learn from Google and 
Googlebase in specific? Yes, absolutely. Do I worry about Googlebase, 
Trulia etc.? Yes, all the time.

KISS is a very big thing with me. I would point out that someone 
generally acknowledged as smarter than me offered the following 
observation: "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." 
[Albert Einstein] We are not merely attempting to provide an IDX feed. 
It is one of many competing uses for the data. The owners of the data - 
let's not argue about who owns it, I know it isn't me - want to have 
some control over the data, who sees what and when for business and 
statute reasons. Some of the information is publicly available. Some of 
the information is proprietary but only has value if it is projected 
into the public. Some of the information is proprietary to the owners of 
the data. Some of the information is private and can only be disclosed 
to contractually bound parties. Some of the information represents a 
potential liability - for example, disclosing when a house is empty or 
what the lockbox code is represents a real civil and possibly criminal 
liability. In any case, the information is not free. Someone had to go 
and collect it, physically (How big is that room?). Someone needed to 
gather similar information to price it. I make the claim that we are not 
trying to solve a simple problem. It is complex. We should strive to 
make it as simple as possible which may be more complex than some are 
comfortable with. I would love to hear how we could make this more 
simple to meet the various criteria that bound RETS.

<quote>

[snip]... but anytime it takes 5 years to finalize what is basically an 
Internet standard, there is a problem. 25 years ago in the MLS 
community, that may be an acceptable amount of time, but it is not in 2007.
</quote>

Hmm. I would point out that many of the various w3c standards are not 5 
years old. I would point out that as recently as last year, 
interoperability between the two major platforms for delivering RETS 
systems, Java and mainstream Microsoft technologies was not possible 
without many work-around efforts. So there is a time and a place. In the 
preceding 5 years, RETS1 was an active and viable standard that was used 
by most if not all of the server vendors to build into their systems 
such capabilities. It feels to me more like this is an appropriate time 
to expand the capabilities of RETS by RETS2.

-- 
Paul
Falcon Technologies Corp.