> EDI becomes Vendor X's bastardization of EDI that only resembles EDI at a glance from a non-technical person.
Having spent much of the last decade dealing with systems dealing with EDI in healthcare, I have to say I suspect that largely happens with X-12 EDI standards (at least, the HIPAA mandated ones in healthcare, its possible others are different) because they only resemble suitable technical standards for the intended business domain at a glance from a person unfamiliar with either technology, the business domain, or, ideally, both. (And, on top of that, they are interdependent, each standard is non-free, the standard packaging of all the mandated standards doesn't include the basic standards underlying all of them that they rely on, and even with all the X-12 standards each of them relies on, by reference, dozens of other non-free, third-party standards, for many of which the X-12 standard provides only a postal address for the third-party source.)
Fair enough, but I was mainly using it as an example of a "standard" being not-a-standard-because-too-many-different-implementations and why a monolithic entity would be less prone to this problem.
Having spent much of the last decade dealing with systems dealing with EDI in healthcare, I have to say I suspect that largely happens with X-12 EDI standards (at least, the HIPAA mandated ones in healthcare, its possible others are different) because they only resemble suitable technical standards for the intended business domain at a glance from a person unfamiliar with either technology, the business domain, or, ideally, both. (And, on top of that, they are interdependent, each standard is non-free, the standard packaging of all the mandated standards doesn't include the basic standards underlying all of them that they rely on, and even with all the X-12 standards each of them relies on, by reference, dozens of other non-free, third-party standards, for many of which the X-12 standard provides only a postal address for the third-party source.)