Most of my job for the last few years has been working on standards. In that time I noticed a fairly obvious pattern for technologies that tend to make successful standards, they meet three criteria:

Yaron's rules of standardization:

• The technology must be very old and very well understood
  • 20 years is a good rule of thumb
• Everyone must implement the technologies in essentially the same way
  • A good rule of thumb is, how hard would it be to build a bi-directional proxy between the various players implementation of the technology?
• Standardizing the technology must provide greater advantage to the software writing community then keeping the technology incompatible
  • Even in the open source world standards can fail if there isn't enough advantage in it, just look at the fights over RSS.