Standards
Standards
How Standards Proliferate (See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)
Situation: There are 14 competing standards.
Cueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Ponytail: Yeah!
Soon: Situation: There are 15 competing standards.
For any engineering task, there are numerous ways a given problem can be solved. The more complex the task, the more room for diversity. That's all well and good for a one-off problem, but if a design is meant to be iterated over time, or if an entire industry is solving that same problem, part reuse and interoperability become issues to deal with. Technical standards thus came to exist so that industries could avoid wasting resources reinventing the wheel , whilst offering their clients a certain amount of simplicity and compatibility between vendors.
But, standards have issues of their own. They don't accommodate every use case , they might have restrictions or royalties attached, and people tend to be plagued by Not Invented Here syndrome . So, competing standards have a tendency to arise to address different perceived needs. After a while, the market for competing standards gets messy and hard to follow, and integrating systems built around competing standards gets burdensome. As a result, someone eventually takes on the challenge of creating a universal standard that everyone can rally around.
This almost never works. In many cases, a new standard fails to displace the incumbent standards, eventually loses funding and support, and thus becomes a relic of history. In many other cases, it only penetrates far enough to survive, ironically making the situation messier. The latter situation often ends up becoming cyclical, with new standards periodically rising and failing to gain traction.
Three examples are given at the top of the comic: AC chargers , character encoding and instant messaging .
The title text mentions mini-USB and micro-USB, which were different standards used in 2011. As of 2019 for most applications of small USB ports (especially for charging / connecting cell phones), mini USB has lost most of its relevance and micro USB is competing with USB-C, as well as some solutions only used by single companies (such as Apple).
Not all standards are created equal. In the development of standards , private standards adopt a non-consensus process in comparison to voluntary consensus standards. Private standards in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector and the agri-food industry (governed by the Global Food Safety Initiative ) are discussed in a publication from International Organization for Standardization.
How Standards Proliferate (See: A/C chargers, character encodings, instant messaging, etc.)
Situation: There are 14 competing standards.
Cueball: 14?! Ridiculous! We need to develop one universal standard that covers everyone's use cases. Ponytail: Yeah!
Soon: Situation: There are 15 competing standards.