At one time I read product standards as a full-time job. I left that job years ago but I still look at what standards a product says they comply with, or are expected to comply with.
Simplistic description of standards.
Many standards do serve a useful purpose: they set expectations for a product. Depending on the standard and who issued the standard, those expectations might cover safety, features, performance, reliability, or other things.
Some standards are free, some cost a bit to purchase, some cost hundreds of dollars to purchase. Some are fairly straightforward to read, some are very dense. The trickiest seem straightforward when reading them, except there are certain terms which have a specific meaning in the industry or market covered by that standard, and that meaning isn’t well known to people outside that industry or market.
Standards can become a hindrance when the market expects or insists a product has to meet a certain standard. A person might have a good product idea but find themselves in an industry or market where the required standard is very expensive to buy or very expensive to comply with.
Standards are by definition reactive and a reflection of the past. Standards describe what has already been made and how it should be made going forward. I don’t know of any standard which was written about an imaginary product, in the hopes someone would read the standard and create a product to meet that expectation.
Standards are a really good way to show the limitations of language in describing the world.
Standards are initially written with an ideal something-or-other in mind. As time goes by, there are revisions which are almost organic in growth. These revisions usually come from someone trying something which didn’t work, or didn’t work as expected.
If a standard is written very precisely and explicitly, it’s easy for someone to avoid if they want to: find a way to describe their product which is different than that precise definition. Then the standard doesn’t apply. And if the definition is written more broadly, then someone who wants to avoid it can argue about the meaning of the words or the intent of the writers. And the standard still might not apply.
Any product or facility which was built or designed more than five years ago, and is being held to a standard whose initial edition was written more than five years ago, will have at least one place where the language or practices have shifted and it’s possible someone could claim the standard possibly wasn’t being met.
The best way to I found to learn a standard is to write a summary of each clause. That’s also very painful and arduous.
Why am I talking about all of this?
I don’t get to turn my brain off because somewhere a product standard got mentioned. I don’t get to turn my brain off because a product says they comply with a certain standard. And I don’t get to turn my brain off because a product doesn’t say it complies with a certain standard.
Standards can be helpful. Like any other tool, they can also be a hindrance.