In the middle of the 19th century, the country's rapidly growing railroads did not agree on how wide their tracks should be. As a result, there were in the U.S. With no standard gauge, railroad cars could not travel across different railroad lines. As a result, considerable effort was expended every day on moving passengers and freight from one train to another, as they transferred between railroad companies.

"It was ridiculous. There was no reason for this. Consumers started to get frustrated by this gratuitous differentiation that added no value, and there was also a lot of engineering hours trying to work around this," Frankosvky said. Only when all the railroads settled on a single track width were they able to speed deliveries and cut costs.

"Just this convergence on a single track exploded the pace of innovation," Frankosvky said. The amount of track across America almost doubled in the decades after most of the railroads settled on a standard gauge, and the costs to move materials plummeted from 70 cents per ton per mile, to 2 cents per ton per mile, he said.

"Openness always wins in the end," Frankovsky said.

The IDG News Service