So, let’s talk about why standardization is so important. Let’s talk about the internet. I’ll call it “Web2”. Despite its many design faults at various layers of the stack, from the communication protocols to the execution environments, the Internet works exceptionally well. Billions of people interact with web connected devices pretty seamlessly. The way that web2 has been built is in an obvious and sensible way: it’s a collection of horizontally distributed and mostly-independent apps (I’m abstracting here, they are really servers/computers that run apps, but ignore that part; these apps are read, write, and process data). It’s so obvious in design that if we were to have independent teams that knew nothing about the internet try to rebuild it, they’d probably mostly end up in the same architectural design. Effectively, the techie version of “convergent evolution”.