The Standards War Between ODF and OOXML: Does Competition Between Overlapping ISO Standards Lead to Innovation?

An Ill-Founded Assumption

Blind’s key question is how competing standards should be theoretically evaluated in particular in respect to their effect on innovation.¹ He identifies eight parameters² that are relevant to determine whether one should immediately choose between standards or prolong the period of competition before making a choice. 
Our objections to Blind’s view do not so much concern the arguments he uses, but rather the underlying assumptions and implicit shift in research question. Blind claims that it makes no difference whether we are dealing with de facto standards like Blu-Ray or formal de jure and consortium standards like ETSI’s GSM standard and W3C’s XML standard. In developing his argument he extensively uses the Anglo-Saxon body of economic literature on standardisation, which centres on de facto standards (Blind, 2004). In doing so, he confines his discussion to situations and problems which are typical for de facto standards and obscures answering the initial research question.