Take electric tools. If I have a Milwaukee setup (lawn mower,leaf blower etc) and I buy a new drill. If I want to use the batteries I currently have I’ll have to get a Milwaukee drill.
Yes this is good business, but not all industries do this. Why?
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Universal batteries are not good for business. They’re good for consumers but not business. If the batteries were universal then people wouldnt buy new incrementaly improved tools with the different battery connections and the company would make less money.
Usb-c is small, reversable and has lots of pins so it can be future stable. It’s an open standard so it doesn’t need royalties. It has room to grow. So the EU chose it as the mobile device charging port.
I mean, in some industries it is but you don’t think about it because standardisation is so much obviously better for consumers. You can fill up your car at the same pumps all over the country as someone with a different make of car. You can plug in the other end of your phone charger into a socket in your house, or your friend’s house, or in a different state. It can be worse for businesses though – it keeps people captive if there’s a high additional cost to move away from one business’s ecosystem. And if you legislate a given standard, you make it harder for a better one to come along, so it’s a balance – USB-C is clearly better than USB-A (rectangular one with only one orientation that works), for example.
Relevant xkcds, as always: [https://xkcd.com/2830/](https://xkcd.com/2830/), [https://xkcd.com/1406/](https://xkcd.com/1406/), [https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)
The opposing forces (or benefits) of standardization and competitive advantage are present in all industries. But the details of the effect those forces have, and the results in technology and products, is different in every industry and case. How much these things are arbitrary, stochastic, or the physical efficiency of engineering issues is a rabbit hole full of spider webs.
Because they are allowed to currently.
I think it should be illegal similar to what the EU did for the cables for phones.
I’m fine with unique proprietary batteries.
There is no excuse for those batteries needing a unique proprietary charger though. It’s anti competitive and it hurts the consumer.
Here’s another one for you. Why do trucks have curved windscreens? It’s not for aerodynamics. It’s not for safety. It’s because you can’t not go and purchase a glass panel cut to size and instead need to spend 8x the amount on the manufactures special curved spec glass.
To answer the second part of your question, there are two schools of thought around standards. One is that it makes it easier to make all devices compliant, accessible, easy to understand or work with (in the case of phones it reduces number of cables you need to buy, fast transfer speeds, etc.). Great for the consumer. The second is that standards stifle the evolution of technology as the standard may not be the best solution, and it stops further research or development. Likewise, a single standard can almost never cover all niche cases and can therefore be detrimental sometimes. It also homogenizes the products in question. Both have their merits, and I tend to lean to support the first argument, but for this reason you have companies arguing one way and consumers arguing the other. As usual, the answer is somewhere in the middle ground.
Problem: Companies like Apple think they can make more money by being different and selling exclusive products that only plug into Apple devices using the Apple port.
Solution: Europe made it illegal for mobile devices sold in the EU to contain any adaptor different to the standard USB-C. Because it’s expensive and confusing for Apple or others makers to produce two different models, they have decided to use that standard worldwide.
There’s an episode on the podcast, Unsung Science (David Pogue) about how it happened. It’s pretty interesting!
The reason why companies often don’t rally around one common standard is because creating a universal standard is often extremely difficult.
The “B” in USB stands for “bus”. So let’s draw an analogy to an actual road-driving bus.
You’re plotting out a bus route for a city. So, obvious question: where is the bus going to stop?
There will probably be a bunch of obvious answers. The big mall at the center of town? Good idea. Grocery store? Sure. Center of a big housing development? Definitely. Hospital? Absolutely.
But what about, say, a laundromat? Is that important enough to stop at? Not everyone who is going to ride the bus needs to use the laundromat. And mind, every stop you add that people on your bus don’t want wastes their time with stops they don’t need. But obviously *some* people would seriously benefit from the laundromat. What is worth including?
Generally, every company under capitalism is selfish. Why wouldn’t you be? Resources spent on things that aren’t the betterment of yourself are ultimately resources wasted. Whether they help anyone else along the way are simply incidental. Or worse, actively assist competition. So, ideally, if your company needed a bus route built, you’d want it to stop only at the places that benefited your company, and only your company. If the currently existing bus route stops at a bunch of places that don’t help your company at all (or provide too much help to companies that compete with you), it may just be worth it to you to start your *own* bus route, that only stops at the places you care about. So the natural consequence of this is the creation of a bunch of independent bus routes catered to slightly different purposes.
Plus, if you happen to create something that other people also like, you can charge money for that. So even if a standard out there does everything you need it to do, it may just be worth it to make your own, and sell that to others. Why use the free thing when you can make money selling a thing you own, right?
True standards really only come about in two ways: either 1) they truly have everything every user could possibly want with very little compromise, and coming up with your own better solution is more expensive than dealing with the compromise, or 2) a government steps in and forces everyone by law to use it.
USB was always intended to be option 1, [but getting to option 1 is very hard](https://xkcd.com/927/), and for a long time USB was not there yet in the eyes of many companies. Arguably, with USB 3.0 (the way the wires talk) and USB-C (the shape of the plug), it has finally achieved option 1, but by this point, some companies (Apple…) were still locked into their own plug types. So ultimately it took option 2 in the EU to force the standard.
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