The Emergence of De Facto Standards: The value of integrative frameworks in the analysis of standards battles

Usually, no particular framework is used in the analysis of standards battles. Such an approach is good for the discovery of new knowledge, but it cannot reliably lead to a comprehensive analysis of a standards battle. The comprehensiveness of an analysis of a standards battle is currently very dependent on the knowledge and expertise of the researcher. In this thesis we propose to use integrative frameworks for standards battles in the analysis of standards battles. By performing an analysis of the VCR standards battle with a model where we integrate the main aspects of current integrative frameworks for standards battle we showed that this approach can provide valuable new insights that have previously been overlooked. A deductive content analysis of the literature on the VCR standards battle showed that some factors of our model were rarely or not at all mentioned in previous publications on the VCR standards battle. This indicated that an integrative framework could discover new aspects of the VCR standards battle that have previously been overlooked. Through interviews we tried to verify whether or not these “missing” factors were indications of actual gaps in the knowledge on the VCR standards battle. We found that three factors were completely overlooked and the relevance of two factors was underestimated in previous analyses of the VCR standards battle. Moreover, we found that design philosophy was also relevant in the VCR standards battle. This factor was previously not mentioned in any publications on the VCR standards battle nor in any of the integrative frameworks. To analyze this new factor in more depth we borrowed concepts from the field of moral philosophy, more specifically the field of human values. This resulted in a first illustration of the integration of ethics in the analysis of standards battles. The final result of our analysis provides a more comprehensive explanation of the emergence of VHS as a dominant standard and also explains the demise of the competing standards, Betamax and V2000, in more detail than previous publications.