Let me tell you a story. There was a company once whose board figured out a way to lock out its competitors, undermine the free market, and ensure their role as a monopoly, owning and refusing to share the very culture that we live in. They did this by a campaign of incompatibility.
Whenever a common standard was developed, they refused to adopt it, and created their own way of doing things instead. Often their own way was trivially different, or didn't work as well. The only requirement was that it be incompatible with other systems. When people were connecting to each other's computer with network file systems, they only allowed their customers to use one network file system: their own. When a competitor invented a revolutionary cross platform language, they under the auspices of innovation invented an identical, but incompatible one: so that the very language their customers communicate with is restricted to their platform. When disk file systems invented journaling and cured forever the problem of fragmentation, they only allowed their customers to use filesystems that were unavailable to competitors by trade secret protectionist laws. Filesystems they created, which were shoddy and ill designed, and still had to be defragmented. When people were communicating with each other, this company forced its customers to communicate only in one document format that nobody else was allowed to use.
And all the while you were falling prey to a campaign of advertising and lies. This radical incompatibility campaign was marketed as being an industry leader, as founding the standards, when what they were really doing was destroying them. The insidious result of their campaign is that users, finding themselves mysteriously unable to communicate with people on other systems, would force their friends to use the company's proprietary protocols. Like how cigarette smokers feel more comfortable if they addict their friends too, since they feel less guilty and unjustified, you forced your friends to use certain instant messaging protocols, or certain kinds of document format. Not because you have any sort of love for the company, but simply because the company fooled you into seeing your friends as the problem, and not the company. Instead of changing your own system, and the bastards controlling it, you assumed it was your friend's problem, and expressed yourself as such.
Soon the company realized it could use encryption to prevent you from using your own computer, by only decrypting the information you needed, when the company deigns to give you permission to do so. There were legal problems with this, so they engaged in a campaign by many names, such as Palladium, TCPA, DRM, and Trusted Computing. A senator known as Fritz was purchased by their gifts and secret bribes, and engaged on a largely successful campaign to pass laws requiring device makers to respect this encryption system. The only thing remaining was to start distributing software in this encrypted format.
They had discovered the ultimate incompatibility. To all competitors these files would seem like random data, undecipherable even by all the world's computing power combined. Soon once you use this company's system, you will be locked in it forever. Only allowed to run certain programs at certain times, required to pay twice for permission to reinstall, or even to pay weekly or they take away your right to decrypt this information and use your programs. Even more insidously, this system keeps a running tab on your hardware, your software, any other programs you may have. By enforcing a unified system, they can block competitors not by producing a better product, but by declaring those competitors to be viruses and pirates, and other harsh terms, and preventing your computer from functioning when these third party products are installed.
This story teaches an important lesson, that incompatibility is profitable. To form an empire, as the Nazi party realized, you have to exclude people, not include people. The included will spread their incompatibility like a virus, until people are either resistant or complacent, and then you can lock out the resistors and secure your monopoly, whether it's on food, money, power, morality, or even pure information itself. Therefore you should never trust a for-profit company's members to be able to set standards that don't reduce our way of life to a police state. They're just incapable of acting with benevolence or rationality, because they're as much a slave to the bottom line as you are a slave to your favorite instant messaging program.
"One World, One Web, One Program" -- 1997 Microsoft Promotional Ad "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" -- Adolf Hitler