Last week I attended the #platfmosphere event in Milan, setup and run by Mia-Platform , an excellent Italian cloud native end to end digital platform provider. There are actually many things to comment on; the event was rich in insights and inspirations, which I hope to soon find some time to articulate. For now, I take this opportunity to explore an aspect which while tangent to platforms, it nonetheless embodies a trait found in any well-architected platform, bringing undeniable benefits throughout the software production chain. I am talking about the supposed "tension" between standardization and innovation , which probably deserves a standalone essay, but an extreme summary doesn't seem impossible. Standardization vs Innovation I believe that the long-standing opposition between standardization and innovation is only partially justified. In fact, the real enemy of innovation, I maintain, is not standardization (properly understood) but the centralization of decisio