De Facto Standard - Standards Battles

Standards Battles

There are many examples of de facto consolidation (of a standard) by market forces and competition, in a two-sided market, after a dispute. Examples:

  • Alternating current (Tesla's) over direct current (Edison's): see War of Currents.
  • VHS over Betamax (see videotape format war): when the VHS format for videotape recording was introduced, other recording formats were already available in the market. Regardless of whether Betamax was superior from a technical point of view or not, the VHS format won the format war due to superior marketing tactics by its proponents. The market could not support two competing formats; VHS became the de facto standard and Betamax was eventually withdrawn.
  • Blu-ray Disc over HD DVD (see high definition optical disc format war).

Examples of standards that are "in dispute" for turns de facto:

  • OpenOffice's OpenDocument format (a de facto standard for UNIX users) vs Microsoft's Office Open XML format (a de facto standard for MS-Windows users).
  • Adobe Flash vs Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), for vector graphics web page animations.

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