Standards That Move the World
The Box That Changed Everything
How a steel rectangle reshaped global trade, and why a JSON object is about to do the same thing to conversations.
Here's a story you already know, even if you've never really thought about it.
In 1956, a trucking entrepreneur from North Carolina named Malcom McLean loaded 58 steel boxes onto a refitted oil tanker in Newark, New Jersey. The ship sailed to Houston. Nobody threw a parade. But that voyage did something extraordinary: it proved that you could skip the misery of break-bulk shipping the sacks, the barrels, the longshoremen wrestling odd-shaped cargo on and off boats for days at a stretch—and just move the box.
The same box. Truck to crane to ship to crane to train. Never opened. Never repacked. Just… moved.
That one idea is not a breakthrough in materials science, not a revolutionary engine, just a standard-sized steel rectangle that dropped the cost of loading cargo from almost six dollars a ton to about sixteen cents. And then it quietly rewired the entire global economy.
I keep thinking about this story because I believe we're watching it happen again. Not with steel and ships, but with conversations and data. And the box this time is called a vCon.
Let's talk about what the shipping container actually did
People tend to remember the container as a logistics improvement. That undersells it by about three orders of magnitude.
Before containerization, a cargo ship could sit in port for weeks. Longshoremen worked in gangs of twenty or more, hauling goods out of the hold with pulleys and muscle. Stuff got stolen. Stuff got broken. Stuff got rained on. The port was, frankly, a mess—a tremendously expensive, accident-prone, unreliable mess. And because it was so expensive and unreliable, trade was mostly regional. You made things near where you'd sell them, because shipping was a nightmare.
The container changed all of that. Not overnight, it took decades of fights with dock workers' unions, arguments over standard sizes, massive port rebuilds, and new ship designs before the thing really took hold. But once it did, the impact was staggering. World exports went from $384 billion to over $25 trillion. The fraction of goods and services traded internationally doubled. Manufacturing moved to wherever it made the most economic sense, not wherever it was closest to the customer.
China went from producing about 2% of the world's manufactured goods in the early 1980s to more than 30%. Just-in-time manufacturing, the backbone of companies like Toyota, and later every major manufacturer on earth, became viable because you could rely on a container showing up when it was supposed to. Walmart, Amazon, and IKEA, none of these business models work without containerization. The $5 Tshirt at Target? That's a container story.
And here's the part that always gets me: the container itself isn't impressive. It's corrugated steel. It has twist-lock fittings on the corners. It comes in two standard sizes (20 feet and 40 feet). A child could explain it. Its genius is not in what it is, but in what it standardizes.
Now let's talk about conversations
Think about every meaningful business conversation happening right now. Phone calls in call centers. Zoom meetings with clients. Slack threads about support tickets. Email chains negotiating deals. SMS messages confirming appointments. WhatsApp groups coordinating field teams.
Every one of those conversations generates data. Recordings, transcripts, metadata, who talked to whom, when, for how long, about what. And almost all of that data is trapped. It's locked in whatever platform hosted the conversation, stored in proprietary formats, and siloed away from everything else.
Sound familiar? It should. This is the fragmented shipping problem all over again.
Before the container, cargo existed in a thousand different shapes and packages, and getting it from point A to point B meant repacking it at every step. Before vCon, conversational data exists in a thousand different formats, and getting insights from it means building custom integrations for every platform, every analytics tool, every compliance system.
A vCon, short for "virtualized conversation," is a standardized container for conversational data. It's a JSON-based format being developed as an open standard through the IETF (the same body that gave us the protocols that run the internet). A single vCon packages up everything about a conversation: the participants, the actual dialogue (audio, video, or text), metadata like timestamps and call detail records, any analysis that's been performed (transcription, sentiment, summaries), attachments, consent records, and identity verification—all in one portable, signable, encryptable object.
It's a box. For conversations.
Why this matters right now
The timing is not accidental. We're living through an explosion in AI capabilities that can do remarkable things with conversational data if that data is clean, structured, and accessible. Large language models can analyze customer calls for sentiment. They can pull out action items from meetings. They can identify patterns across thousands of support interactions. They can flag compliance risks in real time.
But here's the catch: AI is only as good as its inputs. And right now, feeding conversational data into AI tools is a bespoke, fragile, expensive process. Every company builds its own pipelines. Every integration is custom. Every time you switch vendors, you start over.
This is the pre-container world. It "works," in the sense that break-bulk shipping "worked." Goods got moved. But it was slow, costly, and limited what was possible.
The parallels run deeper than you'd think
Here's what keeps striking me as I dig into the topic. The similarities aren't surface-level; they follow the same structural pattern.
Standardization unlocks interoperability. The shipping container didn't succeed because it was the best possible box. It succeeded because everyone agreed on the same dimensions. Once ISO standardized the sizes in the late 1960s, every port, every crane, every truck chassis, every railcar could handle the same unit. The ecosystem is aligned. vCon is doing the same thing for conversations. When every communication platform can output a vCon, and every analytics tool can ingest one, you get an ecosystem. You get a marketplace. You get competition on quality, not lock-in.
The "boring" standard enables the exciting stuff. Nobody gets excited about the twist-lock fitting on the corner of a container. But without it, you don't get global supply chains. Nobody is going to get excited about the JSON schema of a vCon. But without it, you don't get frictionless AI-powered conversation intelligence across every communication channel. The boring part is the important part.
Proprietary silos lose to open interchange. Before the container, every port, every shipping line, every railroad had its own way of doing things. That fragmentation was a moat for incumbents but a tax on everyone else. Sound like the communications industry today? Every platform locks in your data. Switching costs are enormous. vCon, like the ISO container, breaks those silos by making the cargo (conversation data) portable.
The second-order effects dwarf the first. McLean was trying to save money on trucking. He did not set out to enable the rise of China as a manufacturing superpower or create the conditions for fast fashion. The container's consequences went wildly beyond anyone's imagination. I'd bet the same happens with vCon. Yes, it will simplify contact center analytics and ease compliance. Those are the obvious first-order effects. But what happens when every conversation a business has is structured, portable, and analyzable? When can AI work across all of your communications without custom plumbing? Can you easily move your entire conversation history from one vendor to another, like moving a contact list? The second-order effects could be enormous, and I don't think we can fully predict them yet.
The economic angle
The cargo container didn't just change logistics. It changed economics. It restructured labor markets (for better and worse). It shifted manufacturing geography. It made some ports obsolete and turned others into boomtowns. It made consumer goods radically cheaper. It was, in the words of economists, a general-purpose enabler, a thing that doesn't just improve one process but transforms the conditions under which many processes operate.
vCon has the same structural potential for the conversation economy as the conversation economy itself, which is bigger than most people realize. Think about every contact center, every sales team, every support desk, every healthcare provider documenting patient interactions, every financial services firm recording advisory calls, every legal team preserving conversations of record. Conversations are the raw material of the service economy, and the service economy is most of the economy.
Right now, working with that raw material is expensive and clunky, like loading cargo by hand. vCon is the standard that could make it cheap and fluid. And when you make a fundamental input to economic activity cheap and fluid, you tend to get a lot more of the activity that depends on it.
What's different this time
The analogy jumps over two worlds.
The shipping container operated in the physical world, where the benefits were visible and measurable: fewer broken crates, faster turnaround, and lower costs per ton.
vCon operates in the digital world, where the benefits are more abstract: better data portability, easier compliance, richer AI training inputs. It's harder to photograph a JSON object on a flatbed truck.
The container also had a more straightforward adoption incentive. Ship owners could see the cost savings immediately. With vCon, the value proposition requires a bit more imagination; it's about what becomes possible when your conversation data is structured and portable, not just about what gets cheaper.
And there's the privacy dimension, which has a parallel also in the container world. Conversations contain personal information. They contain things people said under an expectation of confidentiality. The vCon standard has to navigate consent management, data governance, and regulatory compliance in the same way that steel boxes handle chain of custody in the physical world, with locks, breakable seals, and passive temperature & humidity trackers. Yet privacy may seem to some people a slightly harder design problem in the digital world.
But these differences don't weaken the analogy. They strengthen it. The fact that vCon is tackling harder problems like privacy, trust, consent, security, while still aiming for the same radical simplification, suggests that the people building it understand the stakes.
We've seen this movie before
There's a pattern in the history of technology and commerce. A fragmented, expensive, friction-heavy system persists because nobody can agree on a standard. Then someone proposes a standard. It's resisted by incumbents who benefit from the fragmentation. Slowly, a few adopters prove it works. A critical mass forms. And then, suddenly, the old way looks insane. Who would go back to loading cargo by hand?
We're somewhere in the early chapters of that story with vCon. The IETF working group is active. Companies like VCONIC are building real products on the standard. Service providers are starting to see the commercial opportunity. Jeff Pulver, who knows a thing or two about what happens when you standardize communications infrastructure, having been around with Alon Cohen and Lior Haramaty at the birth of VoIP, is calling it a new industry in formation.
Maybe it takes off. Maybe it doesn't. Malcom McLean didn't know in 1956 that his steel boxes would reshape the world. He just knew that the current way of doing things was dumb and that a standard box was obviously better.
In my opinion, the people building vCon are in the same position. The current way of handling conversational data is dumb. A standard container is obviously better. The rest is a matter of time, adoption, and the kind of second-order effects that nobody can predict until they're already happening.
If history repeats, and it usually does, this box is worth paying attention to.
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