Is it in best interests of the software development industry for one framework, browser or language to win the war and become the de facto standard? On one side it takes away the challenges of cross platform, but it opens it up for a single point of failure. Would it also result in a stagnation of innovation, or would it allow the industry to focus on more important things (whatever those might be).
Is it in best interests of the software development industry for one framework, browser
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Defacto standards are bad because they are usually controlled by a single party. What is best for the industry is for there to be a foundation of open standards on top of which everyone can compete.
The web is a perfect example. When IE won the browser war, it stagnated for years, and is only just now starting to improve because it’s hemorrhaging marketshare. The Netscape years prior to that weren’t much better. The CSS 2.1 standard was released ten years ago and still isn’t supported well. As a consequence, web development is a Black Art of hacks and work-arounds to get websites to render consistently.
My job would be a hundred times easier if I could build a website according to web standards and be confident it would display correctly. Just think of all the cool things we could have been working on instead of fixing IE’s rendering errors.