What Is The Future Of CAD and PLM Standards?

I had chance to read the following publication on Develop3D – A New Common Data Standard. The author is discussing how life of CAD can be impacted and potentially improved by developing of a single CAD standard. In addition, I figure out that I used word “standard” many times commenting on last posts on my blog. It made me think about standards again. Standards are rising so many questions. It always sounds as beneficial. However, standard related activities create too many political and organizational issues. I decided to make a try and figure out if standards are our future in PLM.

Standards and Users
Companies and Individuals can belong to a group that potential may have huge benefits from standards. Your systems expected to work more smoothly, you can move between applications, you can benefits data sharing, etc .. However, at the same time, standards can stand on the way of innovation. Some of them may really prevent people from innovation.

Standards and Industries
I know many examples of industry oriented standards. In general, industry standards may indicate an industry health. The more standards industry develops- the more additional businesses and solutions can be created on top of that. In general, standards can bring industry on the next level.  In most cases, standards that emerged from industries are very stable.

Standards and Vendors
Do you think vendors need standards? The right answer – it depends, in my view… If it brings economical benefits, it can be really beneficial for a specific vendor. However, it is not clear and in most of the case to support a standard vendor need to put an additional effort. So it means additional expenses. In some cases (i.e. Supply chain), vendors can be interested in standards in order of work simplification between users in a supply chain.

What is my conclusion today? Standards are fascinating. However, standard activity is a very expensive. An additional work need to be done by vendors to support standards. So, behind standards, we can see a very simple economical use case. On the other side, users can have benefits from standards. Maybe we need to think about different business models, that less impacted by lock-in customers on their data? Thinking about pros and cons, I’d like to re-phrase my question as following now- Who Will Pay for future CAD/ PLM standards?

Just my thoughts…
Best, Oleg