Standard and format
Passport
- Rock
- Rules
- Depth
- 4 · Mine
- Time to dig
- 10+ years
- Capital
- ● · high
- Solo
- ✗ no
- AI
- ↑ AI-resistant
- Rent
- ~ partly
Essence
Your format or protocol is the language in which an industry stores and exchanges its work: a competitor must be compatible with you, and you control compatibility. A relative of patents, which sometimes protect it, and of ecosystems, but the mechanics are its own — the lock is not on the user or the developer but on the industry's data itself.
How it is built
Autodesk DWG — forty years of drawings held hostage
The archives of construction and mechanical engineering sit in DWG: every AutoCAD competitor has to read and write that format perfectly, and the reference for compatibility belongs to Autodesk — including litigation and technical traps such as the TrustedDWG marker against third-party libraries. A format turns other people's archives into your moat.
Adobe PDF — give away the standard, keep the canon
Adobe opened PDF and handed it to ISO — and won: the standard grew universal while the canonical tools (Acrobat) and the reputation of the reference implementation stayed with Adobe. Sometimes it is stronger to own not the specification but the reference implementation of an open standard. PSD remained the purely proprietary version of the same power.
Consortia and pools — Bluetooth, USB, MPEG-LA
A standard can be controlled collectively: membership in a consortium, certification, patent pools with a royalty on every device. The moat is shared among the founding club and defended legally. SWIFT in interbank messaging is the same power of format at the scale of an entire financial system.
How it is bypassed
Reverse-engineering for interoperability
The right to interoperate is protected in most jurisdictions: the Open Design Alliance reverse-engineered DWG and sells compatible libraries to all of Autodesk's competitors, and LibreOffice reads and writes Office formats. Compatibility from outside does not destroy the moat, but it releases the hostages — after that the contest is about the product.
An open standard by coalition
Everyone a private format obstructs unites against it: Matter in the smart home is Apple, Google and Amazon together against a zoo of proprietary protocols, and USB-C, made mandatory by the EU, killed Lightning — a private connector earning billions in royalties. The formula: a coalition of giants plus, with luck, a regulator.
A change of medium buries the format
Standards die with their environment: Flash owned the interactive web while the web was a desktop thing, and the mobile era — plus Apple's refusal — buried it along with the format. Document file formats lose their power when a document stops being a file and becomes a live service in the cloud. The attacker does not fight the format; it builds an environment where the format does not exist.
Verdict
Power over the language of an industry's data: built with hostage archives, reference implementations and consortia. Bypassed by lawful compatibility, by coalition open standards, and by a change of medium.