The “it just works” kind of efficiency

I’m editing an interview with John Hancock, who leads the PowerPivot charge and championed its support of OData. During our conversation, I told him this story about how pleased I was to discover that OData “just works” with PubSubHubbub. His response made me smile, and I had to stop and transcribe it:

Any two teams can invent a really efficient way to exchange data. But every time you do that, every time you create a custom protocol, you block yourself off from the effect you just described. If you can get every team — and this is something we went for a long time telling people around the company — look, REST and Atom aren’t the most efficient things you can possibly imagine. We could take some of your existing APIs and our engine and wire them together. But we’d be going around and doing that forever, with every single pair of things we wanted to wire up. So if we take a step back and look at what is the right way to do this, what’s the right way to exchange data between applications, and bet on a standard thing that’s out there already, namely Atom, other things will come along that we haven’t imagined. Dallas is a good example of that. It developed independently of PowerPivot. It was quite late in the game before we finally connected up and started working with it, but we had a prototype in an afternoon. It was so simple, just because we had taken the right bets.

There are, of course, many kinds of efficiency. Standards like Atom aren’t most efficient in all ways. But they are definitely the most efficient in the “it just works” way.