The Standards Innovation Paradox

Hey! Nathan here. Today we have a guest essay from Michael Mignano, the co-founder of Anchor (the largest podcasting platform) and former “Head of Talk Audio” at Spotify. After they acquired Anchor, he went on to lead Spotify’s strategy across podcasts, live, and video.

Michael’s essay is about how open standards like HTTP, RSS, and SMS are awesome in some ways, but often have the unfortunate side effect of freezing innovation in any product category where they take hold. It’s a smart, in-depth articulation of a concern that I share, and have previously written about too.

Of course, if you know anything about the podcasting ecosystem, you might be able to predict that this take stirred up some controversy. At the bottom of this piece, I’ve added links and quick summaries of the more interesting pushback it received, as well as some of my own brief commentary.

But first, the essay that started it all! Please enjoy The Standards Innovation Paradox by Michael Mignano.

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Technical standards are awesome. Standards help teams save time and money by giving them a common language for how their products can interact with other products, eliminating the need to build each component within a market or re-define how systems communicate with each other. For example, a team building a new email client doesn’t need to reinvent the format for how email is transmitted between sender and recipient; instead they can just adopt SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the standard that defines how email transmission works) and focus on crafting a great experience for their users. This means the wheel doesn’t get reinvented when someone wants to do something that’s been done before — they can just adopt the standard and accelerate their product development, reaching their audience — and oftentimes, product market fit — much faster than by building completely proprietary products.