Joe:
You may have misunderstood me. Standards are not straightjackets and they are constantly changing . What they do is provide a framework for practitioners/consumers to follow. For example while our personal computers are constantly evolving we are able to plug in a variety of 3rd party devices because the input/output plugs and sockets are uniform. In the case of industry groups and ticker nomenclature there is a need for some standardization which will make using the products easier for the consumer. Our everyday activities would be confusing if every manufacturer used their own system of weights and measures. Thanks for your thoughtful comments. Lionel Issen From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of acadian21 Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2007 10:26 AM To: [email protected] Subject: INDUSTRY GROUP Re: [quotes-plus] Digest Number 2431 Not that I welcome change, but at times it is difficult to "standardize" a living breathing entity. In the beginning, IBD had only one Computer-Software group. Yes, just one. As the industry exploded, the need to find a more accurate way to measure this industry growth changed. Thus "Computer-Software" evolved into a sector which spawned a host of new sub-groups such as Computer-Software-Enterprise, Computer-Software-Medical, Computer-Software-Education/Entertainment, Computer-Software-Security, etc. Another thing you will occasionally run across is that one company starts out making a certain type of product, then branches off into another product (still within the same basic industry sector). The second product takes off, they drop the old line and as a result the new product throws the company into another classification of industry group. So, as long as companies continue to innovate I never count on the groups remaining the same for any extended period of time. Joe Rogers --- In [email protected] <mailto:quotes-plus%40yahoogroups.com> , "Lionel Issen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Joe: > > This is an overall malaise that affects our industry/commerce today. Nuts > and bolts engineers are familiar with standards and welcome them. Data, > computer, finance reporting, and cell phone types are unaware of the need > for standards or don't want to be "confined" by them. They act like the > electric industry used to when every manufacturer had a different size bulb > so that you had to get your electric fixtures and lights from the same > manufacturer. (This ended in the 1920s when Herbert Hoover, then Secretary > of Commerce, created the American National Voluntary Standards System that > got around the legalities that prevented the Federal Government from > developing standards.) > > > > In stock reporting there is no standard for indentifying by the tickers the > class of shares. With different data sources there is no standard for mutual > funds prefixes. QP use !, Reuters uses *. This can be a problem when you > are looking at data from different sources. QP has a dictionary module that > allows automatic conversions , but this doesn't deal with your problem. > Redoing all your previous work because HGS follows their own standard is a > slow tedious chore and you have my sympathies. > >
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