Who comes up with standards?

Hey Logan or whoever may be reading this,

I've been wondering who comes up with things like PCI-e, USB, SATA, motherboard size (ATX, mATX, HPTX, ITX), DDR, and so on. Are they made by a organization? If so how does that organization get other companies to use that?

Take i.e mini display port. Apple has it on most of their stuff. But since they started using it, it has been poping up machines more often. It's a good port so people want to use it. 

Same things go for bluray, USB 3 and other standards. They are all upgrades from the previous standards. A few years ago nobody was using bluray, now it's everywhere. 

generally a company will invent and/or push something untill it becomes standard

  • intel made thunderbolt, apple pushed it, now it's a standard
  • *someone* made x64 (i don't know who for sure and i dont want people bitching), amd pushed it, now it's a standard
  • *i think* intel pushed atx (to help compatability, instead of everyone doing whatever they please) now it's a standard
  • someone made xl-atx, it catched on, and now it's a standard

basically what i'm saying is: theres no central organization that decides things, a company does what it want's, and pushes untill either everyone adopts it or it falls by the way side

Interesting, so www.iso.org is never involved at any point?

Thanks for replying. So is Bitcoin made the same way as well? Did someone mark a value to it and people start using it? Couldn't this be flawed? Can't you just buy your own bitcoins and mark up the value that way? Is it like the company Enron?

 

Everything is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. That's why bitcoins were worthless at first, but as more and more people were trading them and it became more and more difficult to get them, people were willing to pay more for them (I guess?), so the price went up. You can't drive the price up if no one is buying it.

IEEE

edit: And ISO