Consumers tend to want the personal computer operating system for which the greatest number of applications are written (and are likely to be written in the future). Publishers of applications tend to write to the operating system that is most widely disseminated (in order to maximize their potential market). The interests of consumers of personal computers and of publishers of applications tend to compound one another, and once it becomes clear that a system has obtained the widest dissemination, the market tends to rush toward it.

The concern often expressed about this process is that it can lead to the technically inferior standard. Supposed examples of inferior standards that became entrenched this way are the qwerty typewriter keyboard and the VHS videotape. The critics complain that Microsoft's operating system, which represents adaptations and incorporations of functionality pioneered by others, is inferior to other systems such as Apple's Macintosh. That complaint is a bit whiny and altogether elitist.

The market, of course, determines what is "best" in the view of the millions of consumers voting with their dollars, and in that contest what the elites view as technically "best" does not always prevail (how else can we account for network television!). Market success depends on the confluence of aggregate consumer taste and a broad array of factors such as quality (including but not limited to technical elegance), price, cost of distribution, effectiveness of marketing, and the like. For all Macintosh's perceived technical advantages, Apple's licensing and distribution strategy was seriously flawed. It seems clear that personal computing would be far less accessible to the masses today if policy-makers had decided in the mid-1980s to hinder the dissemination of the IBM/Microsoft standard in order to ensure Apple's market pre-eminence.

It also seems clear that a standard that is perceived as more "open" than those with which it is competing has some advantage in the market. Indeed, it was arguably Apple's refusal to license its architecture widely that sealed its fate against the IBM architecture that IBM had early on licensed widely. Thus, there are strong market incentives for the advocates of a standard to convince other participants in a network that their standard will be open.