The benefits of standards and norms

The first section of this chapter, What is an industry?, started talking about standardization and how it is essential for modularization to make sense. Let’s imagine the contrary and a system that has been arbitrarily cut into several smaller ones, without reflection on the way to define these parts, how they interact, and how they each can be replaced by improved versions. The result would be that modules could not be designed without knowing the whole and could not be replaced by existing modules since the way they are glued to the rest would not already exist. At best, this would only make the whole problem a bit easier to address; at worst, the added difficulty of putting everything back together would largely overcome the reduction of complexity with respect to addressing the whole system at once.

This is the reason why the cutting interfaces of the modules and their standardization are so important, and why we will dedicate the next...