Cringely on the value of owning a standard - in this case, MS and WMA. I think Cringely's brilliant, but this time he's got it wrong. 'Owning the standard' is another strategy that's better left relegated to the dustbin of history. I know, this is total heresy - what do I mean?

As standards become less and less costly to establish, the value of owning any standard drops massively. And this is exactly what's starting to happen: massively reduced coordination costs are fragmenting, destroying, and devaluing standards in tech markets everywhere.

In fact, you can think of a standard as a virtual currency. The more people that use a currency, the more valuable it becomes for everyone - we can call this 'use value'. But when everyone can use any currency anywhere, all of the use value is arbitraged away. There is no point to 'owning the standard', because everyone will simply shift use another one - one whose owners aren't trying to capture some kind of rents.

This is one of the (biggest) things I mean when I say classic network market strategy is, like, so over. It's gonna have a radical effect on competitive strategy in these markets - because value will have to be created by new mechanisms. Or maybe it won't - in which case these markets will become hypercommoditized.