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 The market could not support two competing formats; VHS became the de facto standard and Betamax was eventually withdrawn.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:
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)
“Know your enemy as you know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat.”
—Chinese proverb.