SSOs help firms to reach a high-value consensus. Strategic considerations and political competition, however, slows down the process compared to product market competition.This is well established and has been known, at least since a seminal paper by Farrell and Saloner in 1988. A positive conclusion of this research is that standardization through voluntary SSOs is a trade-off between delay and technological efficiency. The normative implication is straightforward but nevertheless hard to realize in practice: rules and procedures should be designed to reduce the influence of vested interests. Further research and evidence on the effectiveness of rules of standardization organizations can shed additional light on these issues. More work in this area would definitely be of interest.