Standard wars in the Internet age

Standard wars are, probably, one of the better studied cases in technology and innovation management textbooks. There is no serious book in these areas that does not cite the VHS vs. Beta case, as a paradigm of how non technical issues play a key role in the evolution of technologies. This is a concept that is, very often, difficult to assume by pure techies that think that the best technology, best using some quantifiable measure such as speed, image quality,..., is the one that should win regardless of the environment. Market, society, culture... are concepts that are easier to describe than to measure (and, consequently, predict), so they should not appear in the engineer's drawing board.

But standard wars are here to stay, as one of the modes in which conflicts of interests around technology definition and evolution are deployed and, in most of the cases, closed, with winners and losers.

And they are important: can anybody think that internet, as the network of networks, would have evolved to the Internet we know today if the ISO/OSI standards, and its underlying centralized model, had won over TCP/IP in the standards war over computer networking protocols in the 1980s?. Usually, there are high stakes in the game (benefit, control, power,...) and the winner takes it all.

And that's why standards wars are fought with all the weapons available, and in the Internet age, that means, of course, the Internet itself. Standard wars are as much about perception than technology, and Internet is, today, one of the best mechanisms to build or destroy perceptions.

One of the standards wars that is very active these days is the one over standards for document file formats. It has been going on for a couple of years now, with different contenders and fronts: Microsoft with Open Office XML (OOXML) vs. IBM and OASIS with OpenDocument Format(ODF) on the office document front; Microsoft with XML Paper Specification (XPS) vs. Adobe with the Portable Document Format (PDF) on the fixed document front.

As in any standards war, different companies and interest groups are trying to push their standard as the one that better meets customer needs, which usually means the customer needs that can be met by their own standard. The difference is that, in this case, the battle is not only being fought in committee meetings, ballots over draft specs, or corporate alliances. Blogs and wikis have are the places where all the tricks (some of them clean, some of them dirty...) are being played, trying to change the perception of the different technologies at stake.

In this framework, the latest news about Microsoft paying somebody to change the contents of the wikipedia article on OOXML to make it sound more positive, and the reaction that it has caused shows how, for good or for bad, Internet has become an important medium to influence the shaping of technology.

For some this may sound positive: more democracy in the technology shaping process, while for others, it may sound really unsettling as more and more non technical issues will influence what gets designed and implemented. Welcome to the standards wars in the Internet age....