The Standards Innovation Paradox

There’s a strong argument to be made that the most compelling solutions in the short history of the New Internet have been those that are the most commonplace, slow, ambient, and avoidant of hype. Products that actually work and will continue to.

I can see a similar future for podcasts: Spotify, if they are successful, may end up being the biggest player, but that doesn’t mean new and different business models that directly link suppliers and consumers won’t emerge. It will, in other words, look like everything else touched by the Internet: very large winners on one end, and small niche win... See more

Do centralized platforms always win due to speed? It appears that history will repeat itself (web2x2) in two potential ways: extensive protocol innovation is a fool's errand, and Slack will always outpace Ethereum's IRC, as with web2. Could some decentralized projects look more like an empowered engineering team than a standards body meeting (failu... See more

The key to making this work is that while there would be specific protocols for the various types of platforms we see today, there would then be many competing interface implementations of that protocol. The competition would come from those implementations. The lowered switching costs of moving from one implementation to another would create less ... See more