Industry standards vs. proprietary technologies

It’s hard to imagine now, but there used to be a rigorous debate about which strategy was best for corporate IT buyers: industry standards or proprietary technology. Standards have won this debate, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t advantages to buying proprietary technology.

Proprietary technology is first-to-market with innovative features. But going the proprietary route locks buyers into a single vendor, which is too risky for most CIOs given the topsy-turvy nature of the network industry.

Proprietary technology still rules the desktop, where Microsoft’s Windows and Office software dominates. But standards-based software has made huge inroads.

The Internet is essentially a collection of standards that makes everything from the Web to e-mail work. The open source movement takes standards one step further by creating communities of developers willing to work together to add features and fix bugs in software such as Linux.

One drawback is that creating standards is a slow, messy process with many technical tradeoffs, especially in open communities such as the Internet Engineering Task Force. Sometimes, the standards bodies can’t develop an industry standard fast enough. That’s what happened in instant messaging, where attempts to corral industry leaders AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft failed to result in a single, unified standard.

Other times, it’s hard to tell whether a technology is proprietary or standard. The PC industry’s decision to "standardize" on Intel chips and Microsoft Windows software fueled the market for years and made Apple a niche player. But that decision made virtual monopolies out of Intel and Microsoft, which isn’t what standards are all about.

For the foreseeable future, the network industry is likely to remain a mix of standards and proprietary technology.

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