Against all odds — Open Formats prevail! I find it very inspiring, that in the long run open formats seem to prevail, even if they are not initially taken on (or even fought against) by market leaders. Two examples I found inspiring:
- SVG, scalable vector graphics. I remember that I explained this format in my IBM XML courses in the early 2000s. To be honest, it was a fringe format then and I showed it as an example of possible XML-based data-formats, but honestly did not believe it would survive the next years. Now all major graphic applications support SVG and in increasingly better implementations.
- EPUB vs. MOBI/Kindle. Amazon, the by far largest ebook publisher never supported ePub in the beginning but pushed its own AZW/MOBI format. Recently Amazon is “winding down” support for its own format on Kindle and asks users to use ePub.
