Sowa's Law of Standards

In 1991, Sowa first stated his Law of Standards:

"Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X."

Like Gall's law, The Law of Standards is essentially an argument in favour of underspecification. Examples include:

The introduction of PL/I resulting in COBOL and FORTRAN becoming the de facto standards for business and scientific programming respectively

The introduction of Algol-68 resulting in Pascal becoming the de facto standard for academic programming

The introduction of the Ada language resulting in C becoming the de facto standard for DoD programming

The introduction of OS/2 resulting in Windows becoming the de facto standard for desktop OS

The introduction of X.400 resulting in SMTP becoming the de facto standard for electronic mail

The introduction of X.500 resulting in LDAP becoming the de facto standard for directory services

John F. Sowa