Agreed. Without standards, we wouldn’t have the rich web-based ecosystem we have now.
As an example, anyone who’s coded email templates will tell you: it’s hard. While the major browsers adopted the W3C specs, email clients (I.e. email renderers) never adopted the spec, or such a W3C email HTML spec didn’t exist. So something that renders correctly in Gmail looks broken in Yahoo mail in Safari on iOS, etc.
Standards are very important, especially extensible ones where proposals are adopted when they make sense - this means companies can still innovate but users get the benefit of everything just working.
But browsers/web ecosystem are still a bad example as we had decades of browsers supporting their own particular features/extensions. This has converged slightly pretty much because everything now uses Chrome underneath (bar Safari and Firefox).
But even so...if I write an extension while using Firefox, why can't I install that extension in Chrome? And vice-versa? Even bookmarks are stored in slightly different formats.
It is a massive pain to align technology like this but the benefits are huge. Like boxing developers in with a good library (to stop them from doing arbitrary custom per-project BS) I think all software needs to be boxed into standards with provisions for extension/innovation. Rather than this pick & choose BS because muh lock-in.
Not sure why people treat MCP like it's much more than smashing tool descriptions together and concatenating to the prompt, but here we are.
It is nice to have a standard definition of tools that models can be trained/fine tuned for, though.