Success Quote by Ken Olsen

Standards are supposed to tame chaos; Ken Olsen dryly points out how often they multiply it. The line lands because it flips the moral aura of the word "standards" into a consumer choice, like picking a cereal aisle: comforting abundance that is actually a quiet disaster. Olsen, a businessman who helped build the modern computing industry, isn’t mocking the idea of common rules so much as the incentive structure around them. Everyone wants interoperability right up until interoperability means ceding control.

The subtext is power. A technical standard is never just technical; it decides who gets compatibility, who pays licensing fees, who gets locked out, and whose roadmap becomes the default future. So when Olsen notes there are "so many" standards, he’s needling the political economy of innovation: companies and committees often mint new standards to avoid adopting someone else’s, to preserve differentiation, or to keep customers inside a walled garden while claiming the halo of openness.

The joke also captures a particular era of computing, when competing architectures, networking protocols, and file formats proliferated as industries raced to define the baseline. "Choose from" is the knife twist: fragmentation masquerading as freedom. You can pick your standard, sure, but your partners might pick another, and then your supposedly rational system needs gateways, translators, and duct tape.

Olsen’s intent reads as a warning disguised as wit: when everyone can declare a standard, the word stops meaning agreement and starts meaning strategy.