Product Evolution and Standards “Swarms”

At times of rapid innovation,there’s no time for everyone to agree on a single standard for every purpose – if they did, product development would grind to a halt. By pushing the envelope simultaneously on both technological, product and standards development, more creative options are developed and tried, and a richer set of features and options becomes available for both vendors and customers to sample. Ultimately, some will make the grade, and most of the others will die. In open source, the same winnowing will doubtless eventually occur among the many Linux distributions that have dropped a bomb on proprietary operating systems.