Well, one classic example: IBM and the PC market (where standardization helped) vs. Apple and the Mac clones (where standardization almost wiped Apple out). H

Well, one classic example: IBM and the PC market (where standardization helped) vs. Apple and the Mac clones (where standardization almost wiped Apple out). Here's some more theorizing: I think it would depend on how saturated the market was. If standardization would cause the market to grow such that a smaller percentage of a bigger market was larger than a large percentage of a small market, the company could still benefit from standardization, but they'd also have to diversify in that time so that when saturation approached that they wouldn't get stuck in a commodity market while their competitors could catch up.