AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War Audiobook (Free)

Long before there is VHS versus Betamax, Windows versus Macintosh, or Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD, the first and nastiest standards battle was fought between alternating electric current (AC) and direct current (DC).

AC/DC tells the little-known tale of how Thomas Edison wager wrong in the brutal war between followers of alternating electric current and immediate current. The savagery of this electrical fight can hardly be imagined today. The showdown between AC and DC started as a fairly straightforward discord between about AC/DC: The Savage Story of the First Requirements War technical specifications, a battle of competing solutions to deliver fundamentally the same item, electricity. But the skirmish shortly metastasized into something bigger and darker. In the AC/DC fight, the worst areas of human being nature in some way got swept up in the cables: a silent, lethal flow of arrogance, vanity, and cruelty. Following a path of least level of resistance, the battle of currents soon settled round the most primal of individual emotions: fear.

AC/DC acts as an object lesson in bad business technique and poor decision making. Edison’s inability to see his mistake was an integral factor in his lack of control over the “operating-system” for his future inventions-not to say the company he founded, which would later on become General Electric powered.

The battle over whether alternating or immediate current will be the standard for transmitting electricity around the world changed the lives of billions of people, shaped the present day technological age, and set the stage for all those standards wars to check out. Today’s Digital Age group wizards may take lessons from Edison’s fierce battle: control an invention’s specialized standard and you also control the market.