Technical innovation has often seen the battles of proprietary standards versus more open standards. The video cassette recorder wars had VHS competing against Betamax.
The dominant VHS standard eventually tipped the balance in its favour as video rental stores stocked more movies on the more popular format. The laws of greater accessible markets will always determine the eventual winner.
Some engineers like to point out that at any given point a system typically built to a proprietary standard can initially deliver greater technical performance than one built upon a rival open standard.
This argument looks only at the short term and neglects the greater commercial benefits and success of open systems. Any short-term technical gains that a proprietary standard might achieve can soon be copied into the open standard.
But the benefits of larger scale and overwhelming market economics cannot be copied by proprietary standards.
Any technical advantage would be a short term illusion while the greater commercial gain would be permanent and ultimately overwhelming.
Proprietary standards tend to allow faster adoption of changes, especially over the short term. With open standards it takes longer to achieve a consensus on how to develop the system.
While the whole system may evolve less rapidly, individual components in an open system tend to develop much faster than those in proprietary standards.
This is due to the effects of competition. It is a fundamental feature of openness that smaller participants can enter the value system with low entry costs.
With more participants joining to develop components in the open system, more innovation is involved. This in turn helps the whole industry to evolve to more advanced solutions.
In the mobile telecom world, the very first analogue systems were national standards that were incompatible with one another. When second generation (2G) mobile systems were being standardised, the GSM (Global System for Mobile) standard adopted philosophies of open standards.
