Stack them high

"THE NETWORKING industry is perhaps the last bastion of IT where old-fashioned barriers to entry continue to systematically and deliberately hold back innovation," declares Nick McKeown, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University and the 2014 IET Appleton Lecture speaker. "The networking equipment vendors have sold a crock to the world [saying] that open-standards lead to more innovation. In fact, they have cleverly used open-standards to drive complexity, cost and margins sky high, while resisting major innovation and change."