They tell us we are seeing an historical shift. Monopolies have given way to cartels - progress of a sort, I suppose. Think of the difference between the old IBM and DEC operating systems and the various flavours of UNIX in common use today. My Centre, NRIC, happily runs three flavours of UNIX, MacOS and DOS concurrently with no hassles. Contrast the rigidity of ANSI standard Fortran with the modern flowering of C in all its variants, and the intelligent compilers that happily compile these variants across a host of platforms.
Standards are eye glazing.
Discussion about them usually quickly degenerates into deep technobabble about the merits of this or that technical quirk. They thrive on the compilation and organisation of compendiums, themselves highly standardised, in a fierce self-parody. Here are some pointers from our consideration of history and context. Firstly, we are seeing the first signs of a shift in the computer industry from industrial to post-industrial ways of doing business. The large, vertically integrated giants are giving way to a constellation of smaller companies doing more things differently.