In 1991, Sowa first stated his Law of Standards: 

"Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X."^[8]

• The introduction of PL/I resulting in COBOL and FORTRAN becoming the de facto standards for scientific and business programming

• The introduction of Algol-68 resulting in Pascal becoming the de facto standard for academic programming

• The introduction of the Ada language resulting in C becoming the de facto standard for DoD programming

• The introduction of OS/2 resulting in Windows becoming the de facto standard for desktop OS

• The introduction of X.400 resulting in SMTP becoming the de facto standard for electronic mail

• The introduction of X.500 resulting in LDAP becoming the de facto standard for directory services