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When railroad tracks were first laid across the western U.S., there were eight different gauges all competing to dominate the industry – making a nationwide, unified rail system impossible; it took an act of Congress in 1863 to force the adoption of an industry standard gauge of 4-ft., 8-1⁄2 inches.
FedEx CIO Rob Carter believes the same kind of thing needs to happen for blockchain to achieve widespread enterprise adoption.
While the promise of blockchain to create a more efficient, secure and open platform for ecommerce can be realized using a proprietary platform, it won't be a global solution for whole industries now hampered by a myriad of technical and regulatory hurdles. Instead, a platform based on open-source software and industry standards will be needed to ensure process transparency and no one entity profits from the technology over others.
"I think we're in the state where we're duking it out for the dominant design," Carter said during a CIO panel discussion at the Blockchain Global Revolution Conference here. "We're not an organization that pushes for more regulatory control, but there are times regulatory mandates and pushes can be incredibly helpful."
(Score: 1) by sshelton76 on Tuesday April 30 2019, @11:56AM
Well he is using it correctly. There's no misunderstanding.
Yes people hype it, but that is not what he's doing here.
In reality he's saying he wants a universal standard for tracking and accountability on packages.
Something that is open technology that all shippers can subscribe to and update as your package is handed off between FedEx, DHL and/or local post.
I have a feeling he would also like some sort of mechanism to automatically flag troubled packages as well. Such as packages which went out on a truck, but never showed up at their destination or were otherwise lost in transit. Or packages which are caught in customs, or packages which have legal issues.
There are absolutely ways to accomplish all of that.
But instead of government mandating it, it would be better if it were a function of an international standards body such as the UPU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union [wikipedia.org]