Dave Winer:

Then I did a thing called Scripting News Format, which was a way – an XML-ization of my blog which is Scripting News. And www.scripting.com. And so every day when I published Scripting News, in addition to the HTML version, it would produce the XML version. And so my thought there was, “Well, this is – now it’s not a chicken and egg. So I’m gonna publish in this format. I’m gonna publicize it. I’m gonna say, ‘Okay, anybody wants to build an application off of this, great, go for it.'”

[…]

And then in early 1999, I started getting some e-mails from people at Netscape. And they were pretty excited, and they showed me the things that they were doing, and I didn’t quite understand what they were doing. […] I thought they were adopting Scripting News format. From what I could see, that’s what it looked like. Instead what they were doing was they were reinventing the wheel. They were coming out with a format that was totally wholly incompatible with mine.

And so when I finally saw it, I was very angry with ’em for doing this. I go, well, what’s the point of going first if, when the second guy comes along and they do it completely differently. Now, this, as it turned out to be such a major insight that it’s – the guy who goes second has the power to create the standard, not the guy who goes first. The guy who goes first sits there helpless while the world decides whether or not they’re gonna adopt that.

So that’s where I was. That was my posture. And I couldn’t do anything about it, except it turns out I could. And what I decided to do was to embrace their format, and to deprecate mine. And, basically, what I did was, first I sucked in all of the features that were in their format that weren’t in mine. Okay?

And I came out with Scripting News, version 2.0. And that was like a shot across their bow. Okay? At the same time, I said, “I’m gonna support RSS, your format, in everything I do…” […] And they saw the shot across the bow and something happened inside of Netscape, and they returned the favor. They took all the features out of Scripting News format that weren’t in RSS and came out with RSS 0.91, which was exactly what I wanted them to do. At which point I said, “I’m killing Scripting News format, and I’m wholesale adopting RSS 0.91. I’m going to only do RSS 0.91 now.”

And I got myself into the position to be the second guy. I ratified that, and that became the standard. […] [I]t’s like an Aesop’s Fable almost in the sense that you could really do powerful stuff with this, and I used that technique over and over again, and it really works. Which is basically, what you do is you throw your ego out the door, and you say, “I don’t care what the damn thing’s called…” […] It’s just the worst thing is to have it called two different things. That we can’t do. So by throwing out Scripting News format and saying, “Okay, I’m just going with RSS,” that settled all the arguments right then and there.