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 The market could not support two competing formats; VHS became the de facto standard and Betamax was eventually withdrawn.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:
“Today so much rebellion is aimless and demoralizing precisely because children have no values to challenge. Teenage rebellion is a testing process in which young people try out various values in order to make them their own. But during those years of trial, error, embarrassment, a child needs family standards to fall back on, reliable habits of thought and feeling that provide security and protection.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)
“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)