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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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/)
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