I think they mean that people keep coming along and saying "the existing N competing standards suck, let's make a new one everyone can use" and now there's N+1

I think they mean that people keep coming along and saying "the existing N competing standards suck, let's make a new one everyone can use" and now there's N+1 competing standards. A reference to this xkcd https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/