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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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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