Standards exist so that products from different vendors can interoperate with each other, for example, sending email from Gmail to Yahoo! mail, and use common interfaces, for example, sockets for electrical appliances. The standardization does not always have to come from imposed standards; sometimes, it comes from the user expectations. For example, the interface of a Calander/Scheduling application is pretty standardized. There is little scope to differentiate a new Calendar application from the existing products like Outlook Calendar, Google Calendar, and iCal while just implementing the standard is still pretty hard.

One problem which standardization introduces for the product vendor is that there is little left to differentiate itself. For example, either the cables are compliant with USB-C standard, or they are not. The lack of differentiation produces perfect competition and hence, razor-thin margins. The model, thus, works only at scale. The same problem of standardization seems to have plagued products focused on email, calendar and RSS feeds. All three of them are pretty standardized. While one can provide a better UI like Sunrise does for Calendar, or over-the-top functionality like MixMax does, there is still relatively little scope for a product solving any of these to differentiate itself from others. Therefore, big companies with established distribution channels dominate.

The only exception to the rule is producing premium quality products, either in reality or perception and then wait for a niche market which will be willing to pay a premium hoping that they are getting the best product, for example, 41$ mini-USB cable and a 50$ MailMate email client.