At the dawn of the video recording age, a battle raged about the best standard to use: VHS or Betamax. In it, Sony came out with a better standard, but kept it to themselves. Meanwhile, JVC’s VHS standard wasn’t quite as good, but they openly licensed it. The outcome: VHS won. As Stephen Johnson tells us, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From, the openness of standards fosters innovation.
Standards provide several benefits. By having an agreed upon protocol, things can work together, and others can build value-added services on top of them. They make working together easier. Consider the internet; developments on top of the TCP/IP protocol like SMTP and HTML allowed a variety of tools to work together to bring us email and the world wide web. For interactivity, we originally used Flash, and now have HTML 5 as a more secure and reliable replacement.
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