A
de facto standard is a custom,
convention, product, or system that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (such as early entrance to the market).
De facto is a Latin phrase meaning "concerning the fact" or "in practice". Other standards may be voluntary or may be
de jure ("ordained by law") standards enforced by government.
In
social sciences, a de facto standard is a usual solution to a
coordination problem.
[ Edna Ullmann-Margalit: The Emergence of Norms, Oxford Un. Press, 1977. (or Clarendon Press 1978)] The
choice of a de facto standard is the better choice for situations in which all parties can realize mutual gains, but only by making mutually consistent decisions.
Examples
Well-known and illustrative examples:
- The QWERTY system was one of several options for the layout of letters on typewriter (and later keyboard) keys. It became a de facto standard because it was used on the most commercially successful early typewriters, and once people had learned the QWERTY layout they did not want to re-learn a different system.
- When the VHS format for videotape recording was introduced, other recording formats were already available in the market. Many believed that the rival Betamax system was superior from a technical point of view, however the VHS format won the format war due to superior marketing tactics by its proponents. The market could not support two competing formats; VHS became the de facto standard and Betamax was eventually withdrawn.
- The use of the AA battery (as opposed to AAA or other previously proposed standards for low-voltage and small-size batteries).
- * AutoCAD DXF: a de facto ASCII format for import/export of CAD drawings and fragments in the 1980s and 1990s. In the 2000s, XML standards such as SVG emerged as de facto standards.
- * DOC: one of the best known de facto standards. It is used as an office file format ubiquitously, and is supported natively by all office applications. It is the file format of Microsoft Office.
- * HTML is a good example of "de facto and de jure" standard.
- Buttonholes on the left and buttons on the right side of men's shirts, and vice versa for women's shirts.
See also
