Star Trek and AS2

This week is the premier of the new Star Trek movie.  Star Trek has now joined X-Men, Star Wars and other films in the strategy of using prequels to reinvigorate a motion picture series.   The newest Star Trek movie shows the early history of James T. Kirk during his period before, during and after enlisting at Starfleet Academy.  The film also shows how Kirk first meets Spock, who is played by the evil villain Sylar from NBC’s Heroes.  I was thinking about Star Trek today in the context of B2B e-commerce and it drew me to think about the ASX series of B2B communications protocols.

AS1-AS4

By ASX, I am referring to the Applicability Statements 1-4, which are standards for exchanging electronic documents between business partners.  The ASX standards have been a truly disruptive technology in the world of B2B e-commerce.  They have replaced traditionally expensive, proprietary network connections between business partners, with low-cost, Internet communications using open standards.  Each of ASX standards have been modeled off a popular Internet protocol.  

• AS1 – First, there was AS1 based on SMTP.  SMTP, of course, is the standard utilized for e-mail exchanges.  EDI documents were embedded in an SMTP. 

• AS2 – Next AS2 was introduced based on HTTP.  AS2 emulated the interactions between a web browser and a web server in order to exchange EDI documents.
• AS3 – The third in the series was AS3.  AS3 was based upon FTP, file transfer protocol, which is a popular standard for exchanging messages between
• AS4 – The most recently released standard is AS4.  AS4 is based upon SOAP and the web services model.

AS2 and the Wrath of Khan

There were six original Star Trek movies starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy.  Most would agree that the second film was the best.  None of the four subsequent films ever gained the popularity of Wrath of Kahn.  The more successful you are with early releases in a sequence, the more challenging it becomes to outdo your previous efforts.   The ASX series of B2B communications offers a good example.  AS2 was great, but the others have been largely a disappointment.

Much like Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first ASX standard AS1, enjoyed a small but loyal following.  While few companies deployed AS1 for Internet-based e-Commerce, almost all agreed that this was the start of something big.  AS2 proved to be the game changer.  In 2002, Wal-Mart mandated that all of its suppliers use of AS2 for B2B communications to reduce VAN charges.  AS2 enjoyed widespread success not only in the Wal-Mart community but with retailers and manufacturers around the globe.  AS2 has become one of the most popular B2B e-Commerce protocols, second only to FTP.  AS3, however, has been a dismal failure.  Much like Star Trek III – The Search for Spock was a terrible disappointment compared to Star Trek II – The Wrath of Kahn, AS3 has failed to gain any meaningful adoption.  AS4 was announced almost a year ago.  Although a web services based ASX standard sounds appealing there has been little market interest to date.  Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home involved a trip back in time to rescue some whales.  The idea of time travel sounded promising before the film’s debut, but in the end the movie was no comparison to the Wrath of Kahn.  There were two additional movies in the original Star Trek movie series.  Although I saw both The Final Frontier and The Undiscovered Country neither were very memorable.  The ASX series seems doomed to follow the path of the original Star Trek movies, peaking at 2 then following up with a series of disappointing subsequent releases.

AS0 – A Prequel

Perhaps, instead of releasing a follow-on AS5, we should go the other direction and introduce a prequel.   We could call it AS0. Logical candidates for AS0 would be some of the early Internet protocol standards such as NNTP, Gopher and Telnet.  And even bolder strategy would be to revert to pre-Internet protocols such as async, bisync, SNA, X.25 or LU6.2.