Staying outside the mainstream: An empirical study of standards choices

Network economics predict winner-takes-all scenarios in the market place for network technology products. This effect is emphasized by the underlying trend in the information and communication technology industry towards ever more advanced and integrated software and hardware products. This paper results from a case study of a medium sized organization with a long history of very conservative (non)adoption decisions, thereby going against the widespread assumption that one must stay current or be left behind the competition. Three example standards decisions are examined in the paper: office application suites, end-user computer operating systems, and server operating systems. While the organization has seemingly distanced itself from the market´s de facto standards on several key areas, closer analysis shows that the technology standards choices have been successes.