Standards Wars: Situations, Strategies and Outcomes

Recent confrontations include the seemingly endless HD DVD - Blu-ray Group battle to the death (taking content owners and consumers along for the ride); the head butting and accusations between proponents of WiFi, which has been adopted in most of the world, and China, whose home-grown WAPI alternative was recently voted down in ISO; the rivalry between two camps in the IEEE working group chartered to develop and adopt a USB standard (which ultimately led to its disbanding); and the contest between OpenDocument Format and the Microsoft XML Reference Schema, by means of which companies like IBM and Sun hope to weaken Microsoft's control of the desktop. In this article, I explain why standards wars break out when they do, the strategies that companies use to win, and why not all standards wars are bad.

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