Learning From the Failure of X.400

X.400, the UN-backed email standard from 1984, was the more feature-rich system by a wide margin — recallable messages, self-destructing mail, built-in encryption, read receipts, delivery guarantees, decades before SMTP got around to bolting most of it on. It lost anyway. The best explanation I’ve read for why:

X.400 was conceived as a tool, rather than a product.

X.400’s spec prescribed outcomes: software shall do this, and this shall happen as a result. SMTP described exactly how things should work. It’s like the cognitively difficult bit had already happened.

It’s very much another victory for the guiding dictum to building anything digital: worse is better.

Get to market and build solutions that iterate quickly. Over-specification — the UN or EU committee style, or MIT-style development, as against Berkeley-style — means you’ll be shipping paper while your competitors will have shipped features that, imperfectly, are becoming loved.

A comic is worth a million words. From Thinking Forth by Leo Brodie:

Source: X.400 vs. Email: the future we could have had

Hat tip to Pablo Amoroso for the pointer.

• email
• internet-history
• standards

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