What happened to standardization?
Before the 1970s, there were only a couple of ways to contact someone: physically (by post or simply showing up at their house) or by landline. In the digital age, the options seem endless, with major categories being social networks, communication apps, and workplace instant messaging.
One of the common features of instant messengers is that they are all incompatible with each other. If I want to talk to someone, I first need to figure out where they are, as my preferred client can’t talk to theirs.
What this means
This can lead to worse outcomes for consumers as they have to split their attention over a fractured market. Often having to settle on a sub-optimal experience, with various workarounds to achieve their goals.
This is happening in the digital streaming market at the moment. Multiple companies are creating their own streaming platforms, which means consumers must sign up and pay for multiple services to access all the content. This forces consumers to either pay a substantial sum or forgo content from some platforms.
Other than the pain of using the different services, most of the time this causes a lock in effect, as all your data is stored within the service. Often this data without the service may become inaccessible or no longer processed for some IoT devices. This is in the companies favour as they can use this to make you continue paying for the service (either with cash or attention).
Having the data stored in one place also leaves your data open to abuse. For example, Facebook has done some questionable things with people’s data. This data can be sold without your consent.
These barriers to exit make it difficult to leave services you actively dislike, especially with social media platforms, where network effects make it even harder to leave.
Keep on paying, you can’t leave.
Standard and X
This is summed up by this great XKCD:
Often products want to add another feature as their unique selling point, so they create another standard with additional features and support for more use cases. The problem with multiple competing standards is that it leads to choice fatigue. At one point I spent some time trying to choose between Signal and Telegram but couldn’t decide, so I ended up choosing neither. This would also be true if trying to pick a standard to use in my app.
Often in this case, it can be quicker to design a new protocol from scratch rather than research what already exists. This also means you won’t have to implement unnecessary features.
Standards getting hammered over time
Looking back at some of the standards that came about, it’s easy to gloss over the years where the standards wars happened. The classic case of this is the Betamax vs VCR war. However, this also happened in the internet realm with the browser wars which lead to browsers adding tags that only they supported but the other one didn’t.
It takes time for the companies to come together to form an agreement or for one to beat the other.
Conclusions
Is this actually a problem? I’m not sure, but I know I have a worse experience due to different platforms. At work, it’s Jira comments I won’t have seen, and in the streaming industry, it’s that new show.
I’m not sure if this problem will go away. Many of the digital services are different because consumers essentially get them for free, with only the time cost of switching between platforms being a problem.
This is different for the streaming example. I’m not sure how that’s going to turn out but I’m expecting to see a rise in piracy off the back of it.
In other places, progress is slow, but it is happening. Products like USB are slowly becoming the connector standard to rule them all.