Zombies and Standards

A very clever man who worked at Microsoft once explained the problems with the Windows operating system to me like this:

General Electric make nuclear reactors and they make domestic kettles. What they don't do is use the same technology for each.

A kettle is not the same thing as a nuclear reactor, obviously, and clearly, trying to create a standard way of boiling water, no matter the application is folly.

But Microsoft have spent years building forcing a figurative standard for water boiling on us, no matter the application, from gaming to high end servers.

And the result is that Windows is adequate, but not brilliant when you want to run home applications. And it is adequate, but not brilliant for business apps as well.

Microsoft is not the only company that's guilty of this attempt to standardise. All large companies do it, from banks (with their lowest-common denominator product sets), to retail (the same experience each time, no matter the customer).

Standardisation is a race to the bottom. Build the thing that suits the most people possible. Reap economies of scale. Deliberately design out anything interesting  to those at the edge of the curve. 

We are wedded to standardisation in big organisations because it makes it feel like we're in control. The thing is, we're not in control. In fact, we're in less control the more standardised we get.

The more standardised you make something, the more you force those who don't fit the lowest-common-denominator profile to go outside the standard. THey are forced to do so because they are creative, or high achievers, or want to make a difference. Standardisation is an attempt to make them mediocre, and they won't put up with it.

The tighter you lock something down, the greater the chance you'll force a break with the standard. The more you standardise, the narrower the band of people who are perfectly satisfied. People who aren't satisfied often take matters into their own hands.  You're less in charge as a result.

The only time standardisation really works is when you have either a zombie customer base or a zombie workforce. If it is your highest goal to achieve either, good luck to you, and have all the standardisation you want. 

But if you want to innovate, delight customers, and have happy employees, find a way for them to break the standard with safety and surety. Most people aren't zombies, and when they're given a choice to not be one, they'll usually take it.

That's why Apple is now a bigger company than Microsoft, by the way. 

Comments

[Robin Wilton]

I agree up to a point, James, but in one sense I think standardisation neither represents a race to the bottom, nor the death of innovation. There are many cases where, if you standardise the "boring" bits and create consistent interfaces to them, you make it much easier to innovate (and quickly) in the non-standard areas.

So, for instance, if everyone has to design their own communications protocols from scratch, the time spent doing that is not spent innovating for the better.

If the interfaces to the "boring" bits are proprietary, it becomes harder to add innovation to what is already in place I've had several conversations with organisations, for instance, who said "we'd love to deliver such-and-such a new service, but by the time we've made it work on top of our existing in-house application infrastructure, we will have missed the commercial opportunity". (And in case you think I'm having a pop at public sector IT, in two memorable cases that view was expressed to me by mobile telcos... ;-)

I'm not saying that all standardisation is inherently good in principle or well executed in practice, but nor do I think it should be written off as a worthless hindrance.

[David]

The last line of your article states that Microsoft's adherance to standards is why they've been overtaken by Apple. However since the release of OSX in 2001, Apple have been very supportive of open standards both in hardware and software[1]. Some would say that very little of what Apple offer is genuinely new or innovative, they just excel at the human interface, doing things well and making things desirable.

Standards are the only reason that OSX integrates with anything else and hence is a usable platform for doing any of the things it does well.

Microsoft have in the past frequently used their position to undermine open standards to entrap their customers into a microsoft only environment.

In fact, I'd think many would say that adherance to standards are one of the reasons Apple have done well.

[1] Hardware - PCI, USB, Firewire, SODIMM, SATA, PATA, PCI-Express, Expresscard3/4, Ethernet, 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth etc
Software - HTTP, FTP, SSL, LDAP, SMTP, IMAP, Jabber, etctc.

[James Gardner]

I think what I needed to bring out in this post more clearly was that I was really thinking of standardisation with respect to *people*. Technology standards - those are a very good thing.

[James Gardner]

See above - I think that I failed to say clearly that I was talking about the people side of things.