| Sumario: | For the first time, the IT industry is widely adopting open standards--thanks to the internet. In 1864, William Sellers proposed a "uniform system of screw threads", which later became widely adopted. Without standardised, easy-to-make screws, Sellers' argument went, there could be no interchangeable parts and thus no mass production. Not every technology sector had such far-sighted leaders. But railways, electricity, cars and telecommunications all learned to love standards as they came of age. At a certain point in their history, it became clear that rather than just fighting to get the largest piece of the pie, the companies within a sector needed to work together to make the pie bigger. Standards also allow a technology to become automated, thus making it much more reliable and easier to use. The IT industry is finally getting the standards religion. In fact, standards have always played an important role in high-tech, but they were often proprietary. This is not simply a question of protocols and interfaces. Entire pieces of software are becoming open standards of sorts. Operating systems, for instance, are technically so well understood that they can be developed by worldwide virtual communities of volunteer programmers, as with Linux, the most popular piece of open-source software. So far, just as in the early days of the screw, the name of the game in IT has been locking in customers, making it costly for them to switch from one brand of technology to another. In some ways, although IT firms are the epitome of mass production, when it comes to standards they are still stuck in the craftsmen era, which explains in large part why they have been so amazingly profitable. Most of the work in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the internet's main standards bodies, is done online.
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