Product Evolution and Standards "Swarms"
|
|
When disruptive technologies come along, standards need to evolve in parallel, so that they are there when new products hit the shelf. The result can be standards "swarms" that provide multiple, overlapping solutions to choose from. Ultimately, the fittest survive and things settle back into a more stable (and limited) ecosystem.
|
|
In explosively developing environments (e.g., today's mobile devices), there's no time for everyone to agree on a single standard for every purpose – if they did, product development would grind to a halt. Nor would the best standard necessarily be agreed upon in each case. By pushing the envelope simultaneously on both technological, product and standards development, more creative options are developed and tried (just as in the post-catastrophe real world), and a richer set of features and options becomes available for both vendors and customers to sample.
Some of these standards and technologies will go even farther than their original proponents hoped or expected, while others will fall short. Ultimately, some will make the grade, and most of the others will die. In open source, the same winnowing will doubtless eventually occur among the many Linux distributions that have dropped a bomb on proprietary operating systems. Some will find and flourish in discrete niches, while others will wither away. Full Story |
This topic does not have any threads posted yet!
You cannot post until you login.
