TPSM 5: Standardization · Life would be impossible without standards: you couldn’t build houses or cars or electrical appliances; cooking would be a real challenge, and medicine would be driven back to the era of sympathetic magic. Information technology works better when it’s standards-based: today, you can plug pretty well any computer into pretty well any network jack and there’s a good chance it will Just Work; when a computer is attached to a LAN, you can usually mount any of its disks on any other computer in the LAN without much trouble; you can usually click on a music file and sound will start coming out of your computer speakers. And so on. Does this mean that when a new technology comes over the horizon, the degree to which it’s standardized is going to have a major influence on whether it makes the big time? ...
