Often Underappreciated Role of Standards
Standards tend to often be underappreciated. But standards make markets . Standards provide leverage . Standards can be society norms, formal specifications or de facto conventions. Consider the following. In about 1971 to 1975, several personal computers (e.g. computer) were introduced. It is hard to say exactly when the first personal computer was invented. But between 1971 and 1980 , there are a lot of candidates. What is clear though is that none of the personal computers could communicate with one another, some standard hardware was used but there was also a lot of proprietary hardware. In 1980, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ( IEEE ) standardized the local area network which provided a standard mechanism for computers to communicate with one another. In 1981, a personal computer was introduced using standard off-the-shelf hardware by IBM. While this specific personal computer used standard, off-the-shelf hardware components; it was n...