What are some exceptions to the standards problem?

MIDI.

Before the 80's, there was no standard interface to control electronic instruments, just a bunch of proprietary interfaces unique to each manufacterer. But in 1983, amazingly they actually standardized on MIDI, and it remains a useful standard to this day, with any new versions of MIDI being completely backwards compatible, so your Yamaha DX7 from the 80's is still just as viable to use today as the day it was new!

Surprised I haven't seen anyone here mention unicode

There are many, I think. Like what other people have mentioned, sometimes the new standard is just better on all metrics.

Another common example is when someone creates something as a passion project, rather than expecting it to get used widely. It's especially frustrating for me when I see people denigrate projects like those, criticizing it for a lack of practicality...

Light bulb sockets are the same all over. RJ-45 Ethernet, USB-C, Bluetooth, WiFi, TCP, HTTP, HTML, CSS.

Whenever the new standard hits the almost impossible golden triangle of "cheap, reliable, and fast".

It's gotta be cheaper than the alternatives, better and more reliable than the alternatives, and faster/easier to adopt than the alternatives.

Early computers for example had various ways to chug math, such as mechanical setups, relays, vacuum tube's, etc.

When Bell invented their MOSFET transistor and figured out how to scale production, all those previous methods became obsolete for computers because transistors were now cheaper, more reliable, and faster to adopt than their predecessors.

Tbf though transistors are more of a hardware thing. A better example of a standard would be RIP being superceded by BGP on the internet.

Toilet paper rolls.

Somehow we settled on a pretty good size for toilet rolls, and there never seems to be a compatibility issue with holders.

At least not for households. Commercial products have their own things going on, but it doesn't affect most people.

Is there a formal standard, or did we decide not to mess with good enough?

Email, as far as im aware there isn't some alternative email standard (messaging services, whatsapp, signal, sms, etc do not count imo as I believe they serve a different purpose than email)

DNS, while there are alternative root servers, they still fundamentally rely on the dns protocol.

TCP/IP, when the internet was first starting, this was not the only standard in use, but now it is (to my knowledge).

I thought about this for longer than I should've for a comment on a random post, but this is all I could think of lol.

edit: grammar

You can avoid the issue when a government just mandates one standard, ideally after consulting with experts on which is the best.
See: USB, SCART, etc.

Networking standards started picking winners during the PC revolution of the 80's and 90's. Ethernet, with the first standards announced in 1983, ended up beating out pretty much other LAN standard at the physical layer (physical plugs, voltages and other ways of indicating signals) and the data link layer (the structure of a MAC address or an Ethernet frame). And this series of standards been improved many times over, with meta standards about how to deal with so many generations of standards through autonegotiation and backwards compatibility.

We generally expect Ethernet to just work, at the highest speeds the hardware is capable of supporting.

USB has worked pretty well IMO

Standards committees: We don't discriminate. Everyone can have their own standard.

UEFI boot mode

The way I see it, it's not so much an issue of making something that's better than the other standards. It's really about getting your standard into actual use and hitting critical mass which makes all the other standards irrelevant.

When the standard is a big interoperability push that leverages MORE functionality as a bribe to be implemented.

This is how USB (plug & play!), Bluetooth (wireless headset!), HDMI (high def, single cable!) , and USB-C (both sides are good!) all beat the entrenched pseudo standards.

Not exactly this, but it reminds me of my first job. I used to work in finance, and I was given the task of automating cash flow reports that were sent out to hundreds of clients.

The problem was that they were made manually in Excel, and most of them were unique. So every couple years they'd get a bunch of smart people in a conference room, and tell them to figure out how to automate the cash flows. The first step was always to create a standard cash flow template, and convince everyone to adopt it.

Some users would adopt the new template, but most of them would say that the client didn't like it, so they'd stop using it and the project would fall apart.

By the time I got there, there were still hundreds of unique cash flows, but then there were a few dozen that shared the same handful of templates, like a graveyard of failed attempts to automate this process.

I just made the output customizable. The reports looked the same as what the client was used to, but it saved hundreds of man hours for the users. A lot of people got laid off.

There are a lot and in most cases you'll notice when dealing with Americans, who are refusing to do stuff like the rest of the world. The meter and kilogram took over from hundreds of different measurement standards. Most of the world is using the same calendar and writes dates in the same way. Most countries are driving on the same side. Traffic signs are kind of the same worldwide. You can buy screws with the same standard everywhere.

!iso8601@lemmy.sdf.org

For home automation, Matter/Thread has the potential. We’ll see over the next five years, but yes market forces can make a new standard work

Reasons I’m hopeful

• this is the first time major companies are involved: Apple, Google, Amazon agree
• first time home automation hubs “just happen”, with the millions of people who have Echo, Google Home, Apple devices
• small companies that dominate home automation seem to realize the problem of the market can’t reasonably expand without interoperability and ease of use

Matter/Thread is the new kid on the block. Will it be yet another home automation standard, or will it gradually replace the previous ones? We’ll see.

emacs is everything

Small net protocols like Gemini, gopher, spartan, IPFS because they don't compete with the web instead they coexist as separate things.

I see this one quoted a lot when discussing Lemmy communities migration/consolidation/split.

I don't think it really works that well for forums. Some communities have clearly taken over others (see !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone vs !196@lemmy.world recently). It's not standards competing, it's people going where the activity happens.

Chess, there's so many wonderful ways to play.

Systemd

I was surprised to find that there are a ton of symbols that have sought to become the standard notation of sarcasm in text. I think we should really adopt one of those that are far more elegant than the "/s." /s Looks ugly as fuck.

If there are fourteen of them, do they deserve to be called "standards" at all?

what if instead of coming up with new standards to the pile you combine existing ones, based on what works and is reasonable to do?