Craig,
No one said that standards are randomly chosen and are irrevocable. I think the point is that standards, once chosen for very good reasons, hang around long after the original reasons are invalid. Something that is 'better' won't necessarily break the existing standard. Whatever the truth about the QWERTY keyboard (and why was that layout chosen, then? Or was the standard randomly chosen? :-)) there are plenty of examples of technologically inferior products becoming/remaining the standard. Betamax (I'm told) is 'better' than VHS-- except that the tapes were only an hour long. Digital Audio Tape is better than classic Philips tapes, but of course can't be used on a regular cassette player. CD ROMs can be made smaller and denser these days, but everyone still uses the older sort.
Of course, there are examples of old standards being broken, such as 123 or WordPerfect, but that is in a VERY fast changing industry and they were victims of a wider market adjustment -- to Windows -- not of a 'better' application. Personally I prefer WordPerfect DOS to Word DOS, but I use Word for Windows at work.
In the context of Intel, x86 architecture is not being overtaken by a huge market shift (unless Network Computing, perhaps, does it) and therefore is not easily wiped out by a 'better' chip (say Alpha). The momentum of a world-wide 'standard' is huge.
Richard
PS Are those references on the net? |
