Misunderstandings About Standardization
One thing technically minded folks often misunderstand about standardization is that it rewards the "best" technology.
In reality, any tech only becomes a standard when two things align:
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Broad ecosystem adoption. Standards arise when enough players agree to use the same solution. Otherwise, interoperability falls apart. That is the benefit and very purpose of standardization!
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Trusted stewardship. Users need confidence that the standards body or whoever is maintaining it won't suddenly change the rules, abandon the project, or backstab those relying on it. There needs to be some form of built-in trust.
You don't have to be the most technically advanced. Just the most widely embraced and reliably managed.
Lessons From The Codec Wars
History is full of examples. In my own field (video streaming) I saw this playout. The infamous codec wars with HEVC.
Ubiquitous codecs won not because they were technically superior, but because device makers, content providers, and standards bodies all rallied behind them.
An inversion of the same is that some codecs failed because they failed to tick the boxes in the above (not because of their compression performance).
The MCP Wave
I kinda saw this early wave with MCP some months ago already.
I think it ticked both boxes: grassroots adoption of MCP by different vendors, and Anthropic had earned developer goodwill (mainly I think because of Sonnet and their sold tool calls APIs - they had this weird trust build with devs.. compared to other model providers at that point).
I felt that wave. So much so that... I told something very similar to a friend. Him and I sketched out "MCP Marketplace," a unified single portal like a 3 months ago. And we wanted to build this out during a hackathon. We started. Unfortunately, I got sick during that weekend and we never finished it. Sad.
In retrospect, I just wish I had spend time outside work doing this and invested in my conviction and intution. Would have been a cool project.
MCP In Daily Use
I have started using several MCP integrations in my daily workflows build by several vendors in cursor everyday (started last week finally... hence this post). And it just works. I don't even think about "MCP". A good watermark for standard.
Just plug into LLM, brings in capability provided by some other vendor and it works.
Exciting times in general. History rhymes but does not repeat. Feel like an old man in someways.