Standards.

I once worked for Mark Cuban. Seriously. Back in Dallas, long before he was the outspoken owner of the Dallas Mavericks, he was the outspoken owner of a company called MicroSolutions – a computer dealer. (He later sold Microsolutions and started RadioNet/Broadcast.com, became a billionaire and bought the Mavs, but that’s a different story.) Anyway, when I worked for Mark, I was the “desktop publishing specialist” for MicroSolutions. (The very words “desktop publishing” should give you some idea about how long ago this was.) When IBM renounced the standards they’d created with the PC and AT boxes and released the then-new “PS/2” computers, a bunch of us were sent to IBM’s Dallas HQ for training. As the DTP specialist, I was particularly keen to learn about IBM’s “desktop publishing solution.”

When we learned all about the new products, I discovered that the IBM “solution” involved a proprietary board that would plugin to a PC, a board that contained the “brains” of a PostScript printer. You then attached their “dumb” printer to the backplane of the board and could print using the PostScript page description language. (Stay with me…there’s a point to all this, and I’m trying hard to keep this as non-tech as I can.) IBM engineered the product the way they did in order to share RAM (memory) between the PC and the printer. At that time, RAM was still a pretty expensive commodity, and this made the printer a lot less expensive. The problem was, the designers of the board engineered it to fit the standard slots in a PC/AT machine – and not the slots in a PS/2. IBM’s fix was to release an under-powered box based on the old PC/AT architecture, with an 8086 CPU. (For those of you without your propeller beanies on, that was the chip that powered the original PC and ran at a blistering 33 MHz. By comparison, todays machines run somewhere around 2.33 GHz – light years faster.)

Here was a task (desktop publishing) that demanded all the processing power, RAM, and speed you could get, and IBM’s “solution” was to create a crippled PC with an old architecture, just so they could sell a board/dumb printer combo, and con people into buying something that just wouldn’t get the job done.

I was floored. Incensed. Enraged, because I’D be the one having to peddle that crap.

I raised my hand to ask a question. “If IBM has decreed the PS/2 the new ‘standard,’ why didn’t they make a PostScript board that would fit in one of the new, fast PS/2 PCs?”

“Um, well, we felt that the traditonal architecture was a better solution for desktop publishing users,” the IBM wonk replied.

“Who’s problems are you solving? IBM’s overstock of 8086 chips? An inability to communicate between your printer group and your PS/2 group?,” I asked. “How can you call this a STANDARD, much less a SOLUTION?”

The IBM wonk paused, then smiled and said smoothly, “The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.”

I almost came over the table to strangle him.

I’m happy to report that the IBM PostScript board/dumb printer combo was a resounding failure, even after they, begrudgingly, came out with a PS/2 version of the board a year or so later. Companies that attempt to forge their own “standards” are not necessarily evil. Unless they do so simply to grab market share and sew the seeds of confusion in the marketplace. Any company can lose their grip on a market if they insist on doing so. Standards – especially de facto standards – become so because they are useful and make work easier. Forcing the market to adapt a standard simply so a company can wrest control of a market away from its competitors is never a good idea – for consumers AND for the company trying that strategy. The computer market is littered with the corpses of companies who have tried that and, ultimately, failed.

So the next time you think about adopting “standards” in your business, think first about what’s good for your customers. The right answer is not what’s good for you – it’s what makes their lives easier.