Technology

I’m sure you know what xkcd has to say about standards…

Back in the 90’s before this whole internet thing started taking off I was heavily involved with Microsoft’s effort to create a telephony API (TAPI) that was meant to standardize all manner of telephone equipment. The problem is that it has to be overly broad in order to support everything from a dial-up modem to fax machines to the telephone systems used in large corporate offices, and everything in between.

I remember testing a TAPI program I wrote on different types of hardware. I wrote and tested it on a handful of smaller systems that handled a dozen or so phone lines. The first time I tested it on a large enterprise phone system it failed miserably. That enterprise system had a feature that I never anticipated so my code didn’t handle it properly. In a nutshell, if you placed a call on hold then that system assumed you were placing a new call and you immediately got a dial tone. My code assumed when a call was placed on hold that that was all that happened.

I can see similar issues with a broad standard like Matter/Thread. There will likely be devices out there that behave in unanticipated ways, and testing them will be difficult unless you have the physical device. But hopefully, given the backing of all those big companies, they’ll have a good handle on this. It should be able to let end users gracefully handle edge cases, etc.