The economic environment of standards
My friend Bill Nichols, Program Director, Securities Processing Automation at SIIA/FISD and a very high bandwidth guy located this article on the web that encapsulates my experiences with standards over the past thirty years. Simple de facto standards are far more successful then de jeure or top down design driven standards. Although this article by John F. Sowa does not mention FIX, it really captures why FIX has been successful and why other protocols have not achieved the same level of success.
