Standardization: Important Lessons for the Cloud

Standardization is critical to international collaboration: Likewise to the Internet and cloud computing. What can we learn from past successes and failures? The first time I traveled from France to Spain, there was a change of trains at the border: The rail gauge was incompatible. In fact, decades after the birth of the European Union, the variety of track gauges, electrification and signaling systems has resulted in a bewildering and inefficient patchwork.