Yaron's Rules of Standardization

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.

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