Identify industry-standard products. Choose a category of technology products fr
ID: 3911166 • Letter: I
Question
Identify industry-standard products. Choose a category of technology products from among the following: hardware devices, mobile devices, peripherals, operating systems, application software, and local area networks. Make a list of at least three products you think could be described as an industry standard in the category you selected. Compare your list with the list of a team of three classmates or coworkers. Do your team members agree or disagree about the industry standards? Write a one-page paper that lists the agreed-upon standards, products over which there are disagreements, and your explanation of the reasons for any disagreements.
Explanation / Answer
Standards are published documents that establish specifications and procedures designed to maximise the reliability of products, materials and services people use every day. They are implemented in products used in nearly every facet of our lives, from aerospace and electronics to green technology, from transport to construction.
A de facto standard refers to a standard that has been widely accepted and used in an industry without formal review and approval from a standards organisation. The PDF file format for printable documents and the DVD format are examples. On the other hand, a consensus-based standard goes through a formal standards development process. Examples include Wi-Fi and FireWire. In such a case, standardisation communities at a standards developing organisation (SDO), such as the IEEE, IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) or ISO (International Organization for Standardization), objectively assess the feasibility and importance of a potential standard and then develop the standard, which is distributed and maintained by the SDO once it has been accepted.
Taking the category of application software, the protocols HTML, TCP/IP, SMTP, POP and FTP are software standards that application designers must understand and follow if their software expects to interface with these standards. For instance, in order for an email sent from Microsoft Outlook can be read from within the Yahoo! Mail application, the email will be sent using SMTP, which the different receiving program understands and can parse properly to display the email. Without a standardized technique to send an email, the two different programs would be unable to accurately share and display the delivered information.