I am not sure the standards mentioned help make the apps more reliable, cheaper, easier to develop, at least in the traditional "higher level of the stack". Most people associate offerings like Heroku to those qualities (and they build on top of EC2). But even assuming that is the case, once the ecosystem is built around a standard platform (Windows in the 90s in my example) then no amount of technical features can effectively compete with it. You need a different approach. Microsoft in the Desktop was not beaten by a better Linux Desktop, but it will be by a combination of Google apps, the iPad, etc.