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Do Standards Quosh Innovation?

It was put to me recently that adherence to standards quoshes innovation - an argument which I've had sprung on me before.

I guess my first response is that 'quosh' is a strong word. I would prefer to say there exists a natural tension between following a standard and innovating. If a standard is slow to adapt to technological breakthroughs it can be said to hold back innovation. If it moves too quickly it leaves behind end users. I'd like to open up the debate and see what people have to say.

In order to do this I'll lay out the stall for following standards and invite the counter arguments so I can better understand what the innovators and all those people who live outside my cosy standards compliant bubble think.

1. In the case of the web, as a developer if I come across standards compliant code it is much quicker and easier for me to work with as I immediately understand it. So it saves time. As an example, I was recently asked to fix a page which was being rendered in an unpredictable way by Internet Explorer 6. In the end I gave up as the code was so messy and uncompliant it would have taken more time than I was prepared to offer in order to fix it.
2. It produces predictable behaviour. It is much easier to work with something that behaves as expected. If I am a browser I get meaningful code and don't need to fallback on my error handling to guess how I should render a page.
3. Following standards makes things more durable. In a complex environment, a technology that follows a widely accepted standard is more likely to perform well for longer. This is because new technologies being developed, in order to be effective, will seek to follow the widely accepted standard.
4. It gives a technology greater reach. The more people who can use a technology the greater the market for it. Here is an offline example. Some mobile devices simply don't work in other countries because of how GSM frequency bands are allocated within a country as well as the capabilities of the phone itself. It's not an ideal world and perhaps situations like this are inevitable. However the point still stands that if every country allocated the same GSM frequency bands to mobile networks then a device which was sold in one county would sell in all countries. One standard in this case would have benefited both producers and consumers.
5. Product development is made more efficient. It is quicker to make changes to something if everybody understands it from the outset. The more unique the architecture, i.e. non-compliant, the longer it takes to understand it and the harder it is to find people who have the skills to deal with it. Quite often plug-ins already exist which work with technology that is close to a standard. Using pre-existing plugins to extend a technology is obviously quicker and cheaper than writing one from scratch.

It is worth mentioning that in most cases when we take people to task for not following standards it isn't because they are being innovative. It is usually ignorance and omission on their part. Had they followed standards it wouldn't have taken any longer, it wouldn't have affected functionality and it would save them time and money in the future.

The second point worth making is that a technology is hardly ever completely standards compliant. However the closer it moves to a standard the more it is likely to benefit from the previously mentioned points.

The final point I'd like to make is that convergence on a standard can create a platform for innovation. For example the popular browsers, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari render pages in a much more similar way than they ever used to. This allows innovative sites such as YouTube to be developed at a lower cost. Less time and money is spent on ensuring the site performs well in browsers that have wildly different rendering engines.

I'm sure there is plenty of material here for counter arguments and I can even think of a few myself but I'll let the innovators do the talking. Over to you.

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