What’s in a standard? At Yankee Group, we interact with many different technologies and standards groups across the industry. Some standards are abstractions, and others are more immediate for us: such as the IEEE 802. family of networking standards, GSM, and most importantly — written English.

Last week my colleagues and I at Yankee Group were greeted with one of the most liberating e-mails I’ve received during my tenure at the company. It turns out that we’re shifting away from a set of proprietary technologies and are instead adopting an industry standard in the form of the AP style guide.

This may seem like a minor shift. After all, English is English, right? And our clients are more likely to notice our new formatting for reports.

But I have already begun celebrating the little things, such as being able to write “the Internet” with a capital “I.” That’s a habit I developed sometime in 1992, and I’ve found it quite difficult to refer to “the internet” without thinking of it as some off-brand knock off. For example, if you could buy something you’d use to access “the Internet” at BestBuy, then you’d buy an alarm clock that connects to “the internet” without packaging and on a lonely shelf behind a pile of boxes in the back of the Brookstone outlet.

Come to think of it, I actually saw that last one.

Standards are good things. Especially when they encourage ingrained habits.

So, to “the Internet,” I say hello again!