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Pat Barber <mboceanside@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Massive marketing does not make a great company. It just makes them rich.
Sadly, by some people's standards, wealth is not only A VALID measure of how "great" a company is, but THE ONLY measure.
Let's talk about standards. I'm sure I'm not the only one on this List who's into model trains. Today, you can run Athearn, Kato, and Mantua locomotives, pulling Roundhouse, Walthers, and Life-Like cars, on Atlas track, with power supplies by Model Rectifier.
It wasn't always that way. As recently as 65 years ago, getting the model trains of even two manufacturers to run well together was a challenge at best, a battle at worst.
But a group of model railroaders got together, formed an organization called the National Model Railroad Association, started engineering electrical and mechanical standards independently of the manufacturers, but such that compliance would require little effort from the manufacturers, offered them to the world, royalty-free, then started lobbying the manufacturers to adopt them.
It was because the manufacturers adopted these standards that free interchange is possible in the world of model railroading.
Contrast this with the world of computers: a small handful of communication standards, like ASCII, Unicode, and RS-232 exist independently of any manufacturer, but nearly everything else is proprietary to SOMEBODY. Some of the standard-setting companies are relatively benign, e.g., Sun Microsystems, with Java, using their proprietary interest in the standards only to police cross-platform compatibility. Others, like Microsloth, use market leverage, intentional incompatibility, and intentional dead-ends (anybody remember Win32s?) to suppress competition and keep user expectations low.
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