The Standard Way

One thing, which is absolutely striking me when talking to customers, trying to convince them to support the development of the Bluetooth Mesh standard is many of them asking "will it support proprietary extensions?". This question is brought even before they go and check if it is necessary in the first place. Proprietary is easy. And proprietary promises some short term rewards: "we will keep this space for us". 20 years after the Sony MiniDisc people still want to create their own minidiscs.

One thing the proprietary proponents never take into account is that standards ultimately prevail. Think MP3. Think HTML. Think Ethernet. Think Bluetooth. Think AES.

Of course creating a standard is an effort that is orders of magnitude bigger than going a proprietary route. But to anyone thinking big, proprietary is not an option. Even the biggest company like Apple does not have enough power to enforce proprietary solutions on emerging markets. Think HomeKit: a nice set of iPhone accessories, all it is. Nobody will seriously bet on that technology: it is too narrow in scope and locked by a single vendor. It will be scrapped one day or remain a niche forever.

True standards are not only difficult to create. They are even more difficult to enforce. Enforcing a standard is the real test. Making certification / compliance tests so thorough and complete that interoperability is guaranteed. On the other hand it has to be easy enough for vendors to build products that pass qualification. Which seems to be a conflicting requirement. But today nobody is building their products from scratch. Requirements of strict interoperability and involvement of advanced technologies simply cannot be avoided. The world we live in today is very complex. But there is nothing wrong with that. It just creates a great niche for component and technology suppliers. Ultimately building standard compliant end products becomes very easy. And it all makes sense in a big picture. The effort pays off because the market for standard products dwarfs any proprietary market. It just requires more patience, more perseverance, more time and more money to get there.

Ultimately the decision to go proprietary vs standard is the question of an investment horizon. If thinking small and short term, proprietary usually wins. If thinking big and long term, there is no other way than building and adopting a standard.