Re: [idn] WG last call summary

["Bruce Thomson" <bthomson@fm-net.ne.jp>]

(Deleting ccs to iesg, etc. I really don't think we should be bombarding
their inbox.)

> If you were IT director of a large firm, and you had a choice as to which to
> roll out, which would you choose?
> 

Frankly, if I was the IT director of a large firm, I wouldn't roll it out in the near
future, in either scenario. There's just too much missing that won't be filled
in for a few years. We need a transition period in which the multilingual-capable
people of the world who also like to try out leading-edge technology play around
with it for their own amusement, presumably while using legacy domains for their
main mail/websites.

e-mail itself only went mainline within the past very few years. Before that,
people would say things like, "well, I would like to use e-mail maybe, but
if I pass out my e-mail address on my business card, I would have to check
my mail every day and I can't be bothered." The pioneers played with it
(some quite profitably, no doubt) for years and the mainstream benefitted
much much later. This is reasonable and natural.

Look at where IPv6 and multicast are, reasonably well defined but quite a
ways away from being commonplace. Do you really expect idns to be
different?

That's why I tend to take a different view from "if I was the IT manager".
Unlike that manager, we are making something that we will have to live
with for a long time, and the idea that we can have a relatively quick,
painless transition for the mainstream customer is probably getting more
credibility than it deserves.

Bruce