Another new driver for standards bodies is globalization. Today, companies want to market their wares and services around the globe, and so they need global standards. The obvious example might be how the is slowly replacing the smaller, English-centered ANSI set. "Most industries are looking to build single solutions for multiple markets," Bhatia said.

Of course, the old joke about standards is that they must be good, because there are so many of them. But, if anything, there are plenty of technologies that could use more standardization. Bhatia noted that the fledgling electric vehicle industry, for instance, would benefit from a set of standards around devices that charge the vehicles, so they work in the same way that gas pumps work now with all gas-driven vehicles.

In the IT arena, Facebook is leading an initiative, called , to standardize on data center hardware, such as motherboards and server racks, so they will be interchangeable. Again, the motive is to drive down costs and improve efficiency.

"If there could be some level of collaboration around some of the basic building blocks, [suppliers] could use their engineering hours on something more innovative," said Frank Frankovsky, Facebook vice president of hardware design and founding board member of the Open Compute Project.

At the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland last summer, Frankosvky compared the current state of data centers to railroads of the 19th century.