| 9 | Waging a Standards War |
North versus South in railroad gauges, Edison versus Westinghouse in electricity, NBC versus CBS in color TV, Sony versus Matsushita in VCRs, the United States versus Japan in HDTV, 3Com versus Rockwell and Lucent in modems. It’s fine to talk about the advantages of standard setting and alliances, but agreement is not always reached on technology standards. Time and again, incompatible technologies battle it out in the market in a high-stakes, winner-take-all battle.
When two new incompatible technologies struggle to become a de facto standard, we say that they are engaged in a standards war. These wars can end in a truce (as happened in modems), a duopoly (as in video games today), or a fight to the death (as with ...
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