Standards and protocols enable people using, sometimes, very different systems to communicate and pass information knowing that it will be correctly interpreted.
A TCP packet for example has a standard layout and so any system can interpret it (assuming it supports TCP anyway)
It is when big co-orporations like Microsoft dont comply with and decide not to fully support the standards that everything gets screwed up. - i have a bit of a sore point on this as i have to write "IE specific" code for some of my websites in order for them to render correctly.
But at the end of the day standards and protocols allow people using Windows, Linux, MacOS, mobile phones, PDA's etc ... etc... to make use of the same resources - in the case of the WWW mainly web pages
