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 The market could not support two competing formats; VHS became the de facto standard and Betamax was eventually withdrawn.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.
Read more about this topic: De Facto Standard
Famous quotes containing the words standards and/or battles:
“The home is a woman’s natural background.... From the beginning I tried to have the policy of the store reflect as nearly as it was possible in the commercial world, those standards of comfort and grace which are apparent in a lovely home.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)