[Rets-dev] Google Base Housing vs. RETS

Thu Mar 15 17:45:47 CDT 2007

A few observations:

".And 2.0 looks to be pretty complicated as well. I'm already seeing
discussions of RETS Lite on the list before 2.0 is finalized. That should
tell you something.."

As I understand it those discussions also ran into some scope-creep issues
that naturally occur as folks begin to think through various needs. Even in
the attempt to define a minimal IDX solution it turns out that there are
various different points-of-view that would have to be considered. That
should tell us something indeed.

".The KISS principle seems to be lacking in the RETS community.."

It has not been my experience that the RETS community seeks to make anything
any more complicated than needed for legitimate business functionality. It
is the scope, scale and range of that needed functionality that dictates the
standard. Platitudes are nice, but not very relevant. If a solution is too
simple to solve important business needs it is just as bad as a solution
that is too complex. If RETS only served one business scenario for one data
provider and one data consumer I am sure we could be as simple as that
situation. The real word is complex - as one will find out rapidly if you
ever had to stand in front of the community and ask why we can't all agree
on a single set of consistent standard names.

"..By the time one of your versions gets finalized, it is outdated with
regard to other current industry standards."

We anchored RETS 2 against specific industry standards to avoid exactly that
issue. In theory, if SOAP or WSDL standards are updated then RETS 2 is
supposed to track against those versions in the future.

",,,but anytime it takes 5 years to finalize what is basically an Internet
standard, there is a problem."

Take a look at the list of major IT innovations at :

http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html

Seems like these innovations all took many years to be developed and
adopted.standards are even slower. 

There is an entire body of work on 'adoption of innovation' that is relevant
to this discussion here (formally modeled using the Bass equations from
epidemiological work). To suggest that Internet standards somehow take much
less than five years to be developed and achieve adoption is to misread the
actual history. The following article treats the history of adoption of just
one aspect of "web standards" (with some useful references to adoption
models) and explains why it took over 8 years. 

http://www.300dpi.co.uk/macmp/uploads/files/CMPA1-JustinAmphlett.pdf

  _____  

From: rets-dev-bounces at rets.org [mailto:rets-dev-bounces at rets.org] On Behalf
Of Frank Wanicka
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 11:07 AM
To: 'Stuart Schuessler'; Rets-dev at rets.org
Subject: RE: [Rets-dev] Google Base Housing vs. RETS

"It's no more complicated than any other standard."

Ummm, I think there are a lot of people on the list that would disagree with
that, assuming we are talking about 1.x, since 2.0 is not finalized. In a
vacuum, your statement might be true. But it's failure to build upon
virtually any existing standards means every piece of it needed to be
learned from scratch. Most standards attempt to build on other standards,
which means the true level of complication is less. 

"Given the high adoption rate apparently there are others that do not think
it is too complicated either."

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.

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.

There are obviously a lot of talented people working on RETS. I truly don't
mean to diminish the work that has been done, 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. 

Is there an official timeline for finalizing 2.0?

_________________
Frank Wanicka
Real Estate Technologies, Inc. 

From: rets-dev-bounces at rets.org [mailto:rets-dev-bounces at rets.org] On Behalf
Of Stuart Schuessler
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2007 10:33 AM
To: dsrockets at gmail.com; Rets-dev at rets.org
Subject: RE: [Rets-dev] Google Base Housing vs. RETS

>> So why is RETS so complicated again? 

It's no more complicated than any other standard.  Given the high adoption
rate apparently there are others that do not think it is too complicated
either.  Any ideas to make it less complicated are always welcome.  Have you
been to any of the meetings?

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