"Standards can help make a market that goes beyond an individual company," Saunders said. "They provide a platform in which they build vertical applications."

And a larger market means each individual company may reap more revenue, even if each company has a smaller share of the overall market.

Take the World Wide Web, for instance. In the early 1990s, computer networking started to take off as a commercial enterprise for consumers, served by companies such as Prodigy, CompuServe and Delphi. In its prime, America Online, the largest of these services, commanded a user base of 30 million.

AOL's walled-garden approach, however, couldn't keep pace with the innovation around the World Wide Web and the open standards anyone could use to publish or view a Web page. Today, the Web at least 8.4 billion pages and has .

"Commerce, entertainment, education all run on the Web, because we maintained it as open," said Jeff Jaffe, CEO of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). "The impact the Web has had on humanity and commerce has been fantastic, in large part because it has continued to evolve and improve with standards."