The Pitfalls and Perks of Adopting a New Standard

Monta writes to tell us that IBM DeveloperWorks has an interesting article about the pros and cons of 'adopting a standard before it becomes one'. From the article: "Whether a standard will succeed and be widely adopted is ambiguous at first, regardless of who endorses it -- a major player or a fringe element. So if most people don't like to welcome the new guy, why would they put all their eggs in a standards basket when that basket might not exist tomorrow?"

Comments

Re:Yeah...

[AuMatar]

You forgot a step.

1.5) Ignore it while calling yourself "the industry standard".

Once in a while, it works

[Webmoth]

One well-adopted "standard" (which isn't a standard at all) is ID3 (and its successor, ID3V2), the standard for tagging files with metadata.

The interesting thing here is that it is as standard proposed and written in the spirit of Open Source -- its development is moderated by a core group of loosely-knit volunteers, and anyone can contribute to the discussion.

It has been adopted by practically every developer -- commercial, open source, Joe-in-Basement, etc. -- of multimedia software, even Microsoft.

No standards body (IEEE, IETF, ISO, NIST, W3C, IANA, etc.) has accepted it as a standard; to my knowledge it has never been submitted to any organization as a proposed standard.

By community involvement and acceptance, it has become a de facto standard, and for the most part everyone plays by the rules.