The danger of committees is that it's easy for a few members to add tremendous complexity. Why would anyone do that? Isn't "easy to understand and simple to imp

The danger of committees is that it's easy for a few members to add tremendous complexity. Why would anyone do that? Isn't "easy to understand and simple to implement" always a goal of everyone working on tech standards? Not if you're a big company competing with small companies. Adding 10 man-years of implementation effort is a small thing for IBM- or Cisco-sized companies, but a giant barrier to entry for upstart competitors. Also, vagueness in the spec requires extensive testing to make things interoperate reliably, which favors big incumbents. These aren't just emergent, subconscious effects. I've been in on discussions about making a spec harder to implement to frustrate competitors. (not with any YC companies) The dark forces of competitive advantage affect non-committee specs too. Microsoft SMB is an example. The x86 instruction set is another.