The Standards Innovation Paradox

It’s important to remember that customers like using products based on standards because doing so offers them choice and data portability. If a standards-based product happens to break through market fragmentation, it’s important to maintain the benefits users got from the standard in the first place, otherwise you risk alienating your users and lo... See more

The Standards Innovation Paradox

Trade-offs Since adopting RSS saves podcast listening apps an enormous amount of time and money by not forcing them to reinvent the way content flows through the podcasting ecosystem, it means the barriers to finding an audience for these apps is lower. As a result, many of these apps exist, and thus a tremendous amount of market fragmentation has ... See more

Example: RSS (Really Simple Syndication)SS has long been the backbone of podcasts, providing a powerful distribution mechanism that enables creators to publish their audio from a single endpoint and immediately syndicate their content to any consumption platform that wants to ingest it.

And so they did something recently that was very smart, but perhaps not surprising given the limitations of standards: they launched an app that enables them to build out their own rich experience for email newsletters. This makes a lot of sense, in my opinion. If Substack is able to scale its app successfully, it can rapidly innovate on the newsle... See more

Benefits of standardization

Deliver backwards compatibility

Standards help teams save time and money by giving them a common language for how their products can interact with other products, eliminating the need to build each component within a market or re-define how systems communicate with each other.

In contrast to the podcast example above, where any platform that adopted RSS could instantly have the supply side of the chicken and egg problem solved, Substack did the opposite: it solved the demand side by ensuring all of its consumers already had a way to read newsletter content. This is a really smart strategy, and so as a platform, it has ta... See more

Leverage distribution from proprietary systems