In 2001 I was at a company I’d started called State Software… we produced some brilliant demonstrations and were beginning to make some progress in trying to convince potential customers that they should try to adopt this style of application development. And as part of the description we’d say, “And then we use this JSON [Javascript Object Notation] idea for communicating the stuff back and forth… And they’d say, we can’t use that, we just committed to XML… we can’t use this thing you did because it’s not a standard. …
So I decided that if I want to be able to use this thing I need to make it a standard. So I bought JSON.org and put up a webpage and sort of declared “It’s a standard.” That’s it. That’s all I did. I didn’t go around trying to convince industry and government and everybody that this is what they should do, I just put up a website, basically a one-page website, and over the years people discovered it and realised “Oh yeah, this is so much easier – I’m just going to do that.”
Douglas Crockford – Discovering Javascript Object Notation with Douglas Crockford