Brooks Jensen has this to say:
…a clearly, demonstrably, indisputably better image compression format that failed miserably in the marketplace because of bureaucratic wrangling and delay after delay after delay. Shame on everyone involved in this one.
It’s always tough for new document or network standards, because their successful implementation requires so many people to change their products. It gets harder if there’s an incumbent standard that’s pretty good already. You need some big marketplace player, or group of them, to step up and say we’re going to make this happen. Add in some worries about intellectual property, and it’s a recipe for inaction.
So we’re left with no native support of JPEG 2000 in the most important browsers (Safari being a notable exception). Without access to eyeballs, people aren’t going to use the format. Making the images isn’t that easy, either. Support for the advanced features is spotty in image creation aps. If something better comes along in a couple of years, JPEG 2000 is toast.
Inertia is powerful. Consider IPv6. For more than twelve years, we’ve had a better Internet addressing scheme, and an answer to the address exhaustion axe hanging over our heads. You’d think we’d have moved quickly. But no, the Internet still runs on IPv4. Network address translation (NAT) allowed reuse of addresses and let us to limp along for that long. We’d still be on IPv4 ten years from now if we had another kludge that could buy us the time, but it looks like we’re finally going to be forced into the change.
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