When will companies learn? Standards should be standard.

Sony may start movie download service - Yahoo! News

I think it is quite comical to watch the big content companies flail about trying to wrest power from Apple in music and video.

What seems intuitively obvious to the casual observer is this: all file formats should be based on open standards. If there was a firm standard in place, all these companies could do their own download stores and compete on quality of product and quality of interface.

Without an open standard that can be relied on, only a few distributors will rule the market as they do in the brick and morter market. In this situation, the individual provider stores are doomed to fail, because they do not have all the content and they (usually) have horrible interfaces.

If we had firm standards in place for data files, we could count on software companies to compete on the value their software added. As it stands, the large companies rely heavily on lock-in to hold their customers hostage. The file format is one form of lock-in and the interface is another.

The same goes for media files. Companies like Microsoft and Sony have repeatedly tried to take control of the media file standards with WMV and ATRAC. They do not do this to make a more convenient world for their customers; they do it to lock their customers into their "store", where they effectively would no longer compete on quality or features.

Some good counter examples are JPEG, MP3, and TEXT. These are fairly firm standards that are available and allow numerous products to compete on the quality of their features, functionality, and interfaces. These are healthy markets.

Look at DOC, XLS, WMV, and ATRAC (before it was EOL'ed). These are not healthy markets, even after all the effort that has been invested.

Which makes more sense in the long run?

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It is interesting to consider how the creative entry by two companies from different industries might complete change the landscape in the cellular world. The cellular industry has become entrenched and lives off the (still) growing popularity of mobile phones, while they greedily try to create other outsized revenue streams.

If Apple can focus attention of the device and the elegance of the interface offered, we might see an improvement in phones that make it actually easy and intuitive to do the things they can do. Most cell phones now are painful to use for anything beyond basic functionality. But Apple has shown little interest in lower prices.

If Google can provide a phone completely or partially supported by ad revenue, we might begin to see improvement in price competition. Also, Google has a history of rolling features in for free and making their money from volume. Maybe this can help move the industry away from vendor lock-in and high prices.

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Why is it so difficult for the tech industry to realize that standards are good things?

I can only dream of a world where we all rely on the same data standards for data types, documents, and video. In this world, tech companies would compete on creativity, not lock-in. They would strive to make the best products that provided the best functionality for users.

The competition would not be based on FUD and data file lock-in. These methods are obviously cowardly on their face and counterproductive, in the long term.

Lock-in to proprietary file types inevitably leads to stagnation and a lack of innovation. The companies who rely on these strategies end up with weak products which are not liked or desired by their customers.

Every time a solid open data standard has been developed and used, that field has expanded with rapid improvement due to heavy competition and forced interoperability.

Does anyone know of case where an open standard has hurt an industry?