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What is De Facto Standards in Information Systems?

What is Standard?

Standard are the set of rules or the guidelines which was monitored by an authorized organization. In our daily days we use some different standards, some of which we don’t know about them but still we use in our private and professional lives. Using standard examples communicating, cooking, take care of health, building things, growing foods and so on. It provide a foundation by which activities are governed, to gain your business as well as helping you personally. Some of the standards for products, services are listed below:

  • Gives technical conformance requirements
  • Identifies specific testing requirement which must be completed.
  • Highlight important information that must be included to build product
  • Increased safety and reliability
  • Enables interoperability among various devices

Some of the outcomes that may occur without standards

  • Inferior quality
  • Faulty product operation
  • Less manufacturers
  • Limiting selection
  • Incompatibility with the other devices

So from the above information provided we can see how why business and organization need standard to use in their operations. If you going to maintain or create your own standard and controlling the defined one it is cost prohibitive. So de facto standard is one of the less-expensive methods for establishing any standard.

De facto standard

This type of standard is something that is used so widely that considered a standard for any application although it has no official status. De facto is Latin word, means from fact. It achieves its status from dominance of markets on which it applies. If any standard considered as de facto doesn’t mean it is best. Most of the times de facto gain its status because this is the first one to arrive in the market scene. This standard is of actuality and adopted by industry and the their customers so it is also known as market driven. If the market-driven standard approved through a formal standards organization they become de jure standards.

Here are some examples of de facto standard:

  • Qwerty Keyboard layout is the standard pattern in every country.
  • Microsoft windows operating system commonly used business application such as Microsoft word excel and powerpoint has been de facto standard for business and home users.
  • HTML computer file format is a de facto standard but later it become de jure standard same as PDF files.